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2021 brings some major changes to the familiar survival game formula
I have a love-hate relationship Survival game. I will get to know them for a long time and then suddenly realize that I am tired Felling trees. Then I will remain calm with this type for a period of time. In the end, I will remember how much I love to survive and be drawn back again, even if it means sharpening an axe and clearing another forest.
Fortunately, 2021 is an outstanding year for survival games, and I was attracted by a lot of them.This year even cutting down trees didn’t bother me, the one from Wallheim Super dangerous falling wood To all the pines Burning due to lightning strike In Icarus. An important reason for the outstanding performance of survival games this year is because many of them have made interesting changes to the familiar survival system.
In February, we launched “Walheim”, an open-world Viking adventure game that attracted millions of players, who were quickly busy building fortresses and conquering the afterlife of Northern Europe. Despite being launched in Early Access, Valheim still feels very complete and stable, which is an impressive achievement for the small team (five people!) of Iron Gate Studios. Valheim is even attractive to players who usually don’t play survival games or find that certain survival systems are dragging down.As Fraser wrote A few weeks after its launch, Valheim is more forgiving than many survival games, while still being a dangerous and challenging experience.
I have discussed this issue before, but part of Valheim’s genius lies in its distortion of the ordinary survival system. It makes food and cooking an extremely important part of success, and turns your stomach into a stock in which you can mix and match foods that provide various benefits. You need to cook and eat, because this is your way to improve your basic health, healing rate and endurance. When you are on an empty stomach, you cannot fight, run or dodge for long periods of time, nor can you absorb a lot of damage.
At the same time, if you don’t eat, you will never starve to death, or even experience debuffs. Even if you do not eat, you will always maintain your initial basic health and endurance. This makes food an important part of Valheim without being punished for ignoring it because players wander around the house or run around in the safest Meadows biome.
Another adjustment to the typical survival rules: Repairing weapons, equipment, ships, and building parts does not require additional resources. Usually in survival games, if you want to repair an axe made of iron and wood, you need some spare iron or wood. In Valheim, all you need is a hammer or the right workbench. Degradation of weapons and equipment is still a problem. When you kill monsters far away from home, you still need to be careful that your axe and bow will not break. But once you are on the workbench, you can quickly repair your equipment without any tedious resource gathering. Valheim keeps the importance of these survival systems intact without dragging them down.
Another interesting twist in survival in 2021 is the conversation-based survival game. Midgard Tribe Launched in July, although it also has Vikings, cooperatives, and the Big Magic Tree, it is completely different from Wallheim. The survival system of the Midgard tribe is very streamlined-you need to collect resources, craft items and weapons, upgrade your base and protect yourself from the bad elements in certain biomes, but it is more like an action role-playing game. And the session is short but crazy (there is a special survival mode, the session can last longer). Icarus from Dean Hall and RocketWerkz arrived in December, bringing another conversation-based survival. The player lands on an alien planet and spends days to weeks to complete the mission before returning.
I am a little skeptical of Icarus, because every time you launch and leave the earth, you lose everything you worked for: all the tools and weapons you made, the resources you collected, and the base you built.But it turns out This is not a drag fundamental. Thanks to the progress system, I can enhance my character’s survival skills, so I collect resources faster, and I need less food, water, and oxygen to survive, so I can craft items and build more new bases quickly and easily Complete each task.
In order to eliminate fans’ concerns about not being able to build a permanent base like in more traditional survival games, Icarus provides special outpost maps on which players can build without time constraints, and don’t have to worry about leaving when they leave. Lost the fortress. Between missions, I will go down to my calm minimap and do some construction and production. This is a soothing rest between dangerous tasks.
One of my favorite survival games this year is Dice Legacy, This really doesn’t look like a survival game at all. This is a city builder, a colony management game, a roguelite, and A survival game is mixed and matched. You roll the dice, but these dice are also your citizens-they will freeze, get injured, age, and die in the winter. You need to feed them, keep them warm, and even make them happy, otherwise they will attack you. You can set them to collect resources, fight enemies or research new technologies, and you can even turn them into super dice with powerful capabilities. Dice Legacy is a very unusual combination of genres, which is a pleasant surprise.
As for the ongoing survival game, I started using Rust at the end of the year, which made me impressed with its growth and changes since it first appeared in 2013. I don’t need to sound its horn-Rust has been in the top 10 on Steam for many years. This year’s player base has been further increased and it continues to get new features such as underwater laboratory, underground railway network, military base, mission NPC, etc. .There is also a systematic plan, players can Drive off the edge of the map On one server, then reach another server.
It is great to see so many new changes in the survival system in 2021, and I hope that this trend will continue in 2022. There are many survival games worth looking forward to: Ark 2 Due this year, Son of the forest (Follow-up of the forest) May is coming, waning light 2, stalker 2, space station simulation Exon, There are many more in our near future. Hopefully, the next batch of survival games will change the formula as we saw in 2021.