Anything it takes: Survival In Video Games

Some of the most harrowing tales in human history are based around survival. Robinson Crusoe, Cast Away, and The Life of Pi are some standout examples. To game designers, survival is a fun mechanic to add into a game, or in the case of games like DayZ and The Long Dark it’s the entire point. These days survival mechanics move a game more towards reality, i.e. the need to eat, drink, etc while settling you in a hostile environment. Developers can sometimes shoehorn in mechanics where they don’t quite fit. After all, to someone with a hammer everything looks suspiciously like a nail.

So what makes for good survival mechanics in games? Why is survival fun in the first place?

Fallout: New Vegas is a game with surprisingly deep survival mechanics. It’s made with the same Bethesda engine as Fallout 3, but the game’s staff are all ex Interplay Entertainment (developers of the original 2 Fallout games) members. The game returned you to the west coast with a twisting tale of betrayal, greed, and complex faction interplay.

Fallout: New Vegas is hailed as a return to better parts of the Fallout series. I prefer Fallout 2, but F:NV sure beats the hell out of Fallout 4.

While you could eat and drink in Fallout 3, it offered little benefits beside a small bit of health and a hefty dose of radiation. In F:NV’s Hardcore Mode, eating and drinking are a must. As you skip meals and pass up water bottles, your stats slowly decrease. Go without for long enough and you die of starvation and/or dehydration. Stimpacks no longer heal a chunk of health instantly, but instead restore it over time. To heal crippled limbs, you must find a doctor, a doctor’s bag, or a few other options. Ammunition now has weight, instead of being magically weightless. These are not gigantic changes, but they fundamentally change how you play the game.

F:NV is one of the only games I've played that actually makes buying food a worthwhile option.

You now have to think about food/water weight when you’re moving across the Mojave. You can’t just pick up every weapon you find, but you have to think about what kind of ammo you’re carrying and if you can afford to spend more weight points on a new type. Moreover, the scarcity of resources plays into the game in a very thematic way, drawing you more into the world. You can gather resources to cook or create health items and you have to make choices about how to use everything to the best of your ability.

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R series is another series that features a few survival elements, though only in two out of three games. The survival elements are lighter in S.T.A.L.K.E.R than in FNV, but there are a few other mechanics that balance the whole package out, for the most part.

Nothing spells bleak quite like swamps and radiation. I'm still a little confused as to why anybody would go into the Zone, frankly.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R has no thirst mechanic and the hunger mechanic takes several in-game days to take effect. After a few days, your health lowers constantly and your stamina is severely reduced. S.T.A.L.K.E.R stumbles when it doesn’t make hunger a bigger threat. S.T.A.L.K.E.R could lower your carrying capacity, or affect your weapon handling when don’t eat. Maybe you’re so weak from hunger that you can’t hold your gun steady, or perhaps kickback is increased because you can’t brace the weapon properly?  S.T.A.L.K.E.R introduces new combat and survival mechanics that shine, however. When you take damage in S.T.A.L.K.E.R you bleed and your health drops over time, with speed depending on the severity of the wound. If you don’t use a bandage on yourself, you can bleed out in the middle of a fight. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky and S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat radiation storms can occur and random, forcing you to seek shelter. If you’re caught outdoors, your health drops rapidly, and you’re assailed by disorienting effects.

Sprinting to find cover as the sky darkens around you is one of more harrowing parts of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series. These emissions are also a great example of gameworld and narrative working with gameplay.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R games put you in one of the most inhospitable environments ever designed in games, but the survival aspect that comes with that setting is never really addressed, with respect to your character’s limitations. It might have been better to remove the food aspect of this game entirely, as it doesn’t add any depth to the game.

Why does any of this even matter? Isn’t survival kind of a terrible burden to have to face in real life? Well, survival mechanics offer a degree of realism that you usually don’t see in games. This is not to say that it makes games “realistic” or anything like that, but it does take some of our real world expectations and give them tangible gameplay implications. We get hungry, so does our character. We need to drink, and if we don’t in game, our character will suffer. It’s a fine line to tread between oppressing a player with annoying mechanics that stop the action every ten seconds and half-assign the mechanics so that they’re just in the way of gameplay, but when developers manage to get it right, it adds a lot to the game. I think you could also make a good case for the general direction towards more “realistic” mechanics in games. Swinging a sword in The Legend of Zelda is very different from swinging it in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, for instance. More complex mechanics feel like a natural progression and they challenge players a more.

Survival mechanics are a cool tool when used well. They can add a lot of depth to a game and make the player feel more involved in the world. Next time you’re playing a game with survival elements, think about how the game uses these elements to draw you in (or push you out if they’re bad) of the game world. How do the mechanics change how you play? What would make the mechanics better?

Wide as an Ocean, Deep as a Puddle

I think a lot of us remember being a kid and splashing around in puddles. Who didn’t love doing that? You probably also liked pools, or maybe the ocean, if you swam in either. Maybe you liked one more than the other, but both were fun. Video games are pretty similar, when you think about it. There are games that are shallow and games that are deep, and both are fun.

But what are the effects of increasing the scale of a game? What kind of experience do you find?

Sometime in the recent past, games focused on scale rather than responsiveness. By that, I mean that games have more places to go, but that you can see where things don’t quite connect. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a great example of this. Skyrim is gigantic in terms of land, dungeons, caves, and exploration. There are hundreds of NPCs to interact with, quests to take, and chests to open. You can spend hundreds of hours in the game without even touching the main quest.

The world  of Skyrim is huge,. You can travel everywhere you can see, but does it react to you? Does it care about what you do and how you play? 

After a while, however, you might notice that a lot of the caves seem to repeat themselves, and that most of the quests are little more than fetch quests. The ocean you thought you were swimming now looks more like a kiddie pool. You can head to the College of Winterhold, the magical center of the region, earn the Robes of the Archmage, and NPCs will still say to you, "You know, if you have the aptitude, you should join the mages' college in Winterhold." You’re literally a legendary and mythical hero but nobody in the game reacts to what you do. None of this is to say that Skyrim is not enjoyable or anything of the sort, but I think it’s clear to see how the world is less responsive when scale is increased. Of course, not every RPG runs focuses on scale.

Hope you like looking at these three kinds of dungeons, because that's what you'll be seeing for your exploration time in Skyrim.

Hope you like looking at these three kinds of dungeons, because that's what you'll be seeing for your exploration time in Skyrim.

Hope you like looking at these three kinds of dungeons, because that's what you'll be seeing for your exploration time in Skyrim.

Dragon Age II is a game that attracted a lot of flak when it came out. Many people thought it stripped too much from the first game in the series (Dragon Age: Origins) and reused too many locations.

A followup to the hit Dragon Age: Origins:, Dragon Age II had a much tighter focus in terms of explorable space and character interaction.

DA II shined when it came to responsiveness. You had a core group of characters that you saw grow and react to your choices and you got to see how your choices changed the world around you. As you became Champion of Kirkwall, the city where much of the game takes place, people reacted to you differently and the kind of quests you found changed. You went from just another refugee to the most important citizen of Kirkwall and advisor to the Viscount. The intense focus on characters also made you feel as if your choices had impact, because they affected how your companions viewed you and how their combat skills grew. DA II lacks scale, however. It may have been intentional, or it may have been due to a lack of time, but you don’t go many places in DA II. The places you do go you see again and again. Eventually you start to ask why pirates, apostate mages, and darkspawn all hang out in the same cave at different times. There is also a huge reuse of objects in the game, and it does start to wear on you. The intense focus on responsiveness makes you really realize how small the game world is.

You will see this warehouse over a dozen times, with different enemies, quests, and treasure inside.

At this point, you might think that responsiveness and scale can’t exist together. There really aren’t many games which managed to blend the two, but Fallout 2: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game manages to. Fallout 2 is a much beloved game and some people consider it to be the last true game in the Fallout series because of the large changes the Bethesda made in the later games.  

In Fallout 2, you took the place of a descendant of the main character of Fallout 1, and you ventured out into the wasteland to find the Garden of Eden Creation Kit (or G.E.C.K) to save your dying village. As you head through the game, you gained a reputation according to your choices. For instance, you can join a Mafia family and stores give you discounts, you can become a champion boxer and doors, usually open to only the most charismatic, will open, and you can defend the innocent and all the evil characters in the world will be suspicious when talking to you. The world and people around you reacted to you in a way that makes sense, even though the in-game world of Fallout 2 is huge and filled with characters, settlements, and quests comparable to Skyrim. The combination of responsiveness and scale help Fallout 2 stand out in a crowd populated by some of the best games ever made.

IT’s hard to make a large world that reacts to player choices, but it can be done. There aren’t many games that accomplish it, but it adds something very special to those that do. It’s easy to imagine how hard it would be to great something huge with great detail, but maybe it says something about what makes a truly talented developer, that they’re somebody who can get fire and ice to work together.