Survival games are a subgenre of which are often set in hostile, intense, open-world environments. Players generally start with minimal equipment and are required to Survival as long as possible by finding the resources necessary to manage hunger, thirst, disease and/or mental state. Many survival games are based on randomly or procedurally generated persistent world; more recently, survival games are often playable online, allowing players to interact in a single world. Survival games are generally open-ended with no set goals and often closely related to the survival horror genre, where the player must survive within a supernatural setting, such as a zombie apocalypse.
In some games, the world is generated randomly so that the player must actively search for food and weapons, often provided with visual and auditory cues of the types of resources that may be found nearby. The player character typically has a health bar and will take damage from falling, starving, drowning, contact with fire or harmful substances, and attacks by monsters that inhabit the world. Other metrics related to the player-character's vulnerability to the game world may also come into play. For example, the survival game, Don't Starve, features a separate hunger gauge and a sanity meter, which will cause the death of the character if allowed to deplete. Character death may not be the end of the game, however – the player may be able to respawn and return to the game location at which their character died in order to retrieve lost equipment. Other survival games use permadeath: the character has one life, and dying requires that the game be restarted. While many survival games are aimed at constantly putting the player at risk from hostile creatures or the environment, others may downplay the amount of danger the player faces and instead encourage more open-world gameplay, where player character death can still occur if the player is not careful or properly equipped.
A common example is the creation of pick-axes of various levels of hardness: wooden pick-axes may allow stone to be mined but not metallic ; however, a pick-axe made from collected stone can be used to mine these metallic ores. The same concept applies to weapons and armor, with better offensive and defense bonuses provided by items made from materials which are more difficult to acquire. The crafting system often includes durability factors for tools and weapons, causing the tool to break after a certain amount of usage. Crafting systems may not give the player the necessary recipes for crafting, requiring for them to be learned through experimentation or from Strategy guide.
An early example of the survival game genre is UnReal World, which was created by Sami Maaranen in 1992 and is still in active development. The Roguelike game used ASCII art and placed the player in the harsh conditions of Finland during the Iron Age. Unlike traditional Roguelike games, where there was a goal to reach, UnReal Worlds only goal was to survive as long as possible against wild creatures and the dangers that the snowy weather created. Another early example of the survival game genre is the Super Nintendo Entertainment System game SOS, released by Human Entertainment in 1993.Kurt Kalata, SOS / Septentrion (プテントリオン) - Super NES (1993) , Hardcore Gaming 101
Stranded (2003) was a simple 3D survival game with a concept very similar to modern survival games. Wurm Online contains elements that have ultimately influenced a number of survival games. Being a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), the game sets players as characters in a medieval setting, allows them to terraform the land, create buildings, and effectively develop their own kingdoms. Rolf Jansson and Markus Persson began the initial development of the game in 2003, and although Persson left around 2007, the game is still in active development. Persson became instrumental in developing Minecraft, which many consider to have popularised the survival game genre. From its initial public release in 2009, Minecraft focuses on resource-gathering and crafting in a procedurally-generated world, and requires the player to defend themselves during night cycles while gathering resources at other times.
Another key title in the survival genre was DayZ. It was originally released as a mod for ARMA 2 in 2012, but was later released as a standalone game, making over $5 million in one day once it became available. The game sets the players in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, where they must avoid hordes of zombies while scavenging through the remains of human civilization for resources. As a result of the financial success of Minecraft and DayZ, numerous titles of the survival genre were released from 2012 onward. Some believe that the market has become saturated with titles based on the same post-apocalyptic setting, clones of more popular titles, and titles released as a quick attempt to make money using early access models. The research firm SuperData estimated that survival games brought in over $400 million in revenue over the first six months of 2017, making the genre one of the largest markets in the video game industry.
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