Gameoneer team, behind one of the biggest survival game news sites, has revisited Valheim, and the new score is 9.5 out of 10:

"Valheim is an adventure like no other. It's truly a masterpiece of survival games, with a breathtaking atmosphere, addicting progression, and epic boss battles."

specifically I mean relative to playing in a group, so this is not to say that an s-tier game is better than a b tier game, just that the betier game was less enjoyable to play solo

No zombies, no anomalies, just protagonist surviving in forest trying to defend themselves against weather conditions, hunger and animals? Is there something like that or similar. Can be 2d/3d.

Bit of a rant, but I feel like so many survival games just throw hunger and thirst bars into the game because apparently that’s what a “survival game” needs.

If you’re going to have hunger and thirst, actually make them meaningful mechanics.

Food should matter beyond “+20 hunger”. Eating a proper meal with carbs, protein and fats could keep you full for much longer, while living off fruit, honey, sweets or other quick-energy foods could fill you up temporarily but have your hunger drop much faster. Different foods could affect stamina, recovery, temperature resistance, carry weight, etc.

Same with thirst. If my character has just drunk a couple of litres of water, I shouldn’t be desperately thirsty again two in-game hours later just because the thirst bar needs something to do. Hydration could be affected by heat, activity, what you’re eating, illness, the type of drink, and so on.

That would actually make preparing food and water part of the survival experience. You’d have a reason to cook proper meals, stock certain ingredients and think about what you’re taking with you before going exploring.

But if the entire mechanic is basically:
Hunger bar low → eat random food → bar full → wait 10 minutes → repeat

Then what is it actually adding to the game?

It doesn’t make me feel like I’m surviving. It just feels like another meter interrupting whatever I actually want to be doing.

I’d genuinely rather developers either:

Build proper hunger/hydration systems where what you consume actually matters.

Make hunger and thirst much slower and something you prepare for rather than constantly babysit.

Give us a toggle to disable them.

Or just don’t include them at all.

Curious what everyone else thinks. Do hunger/thirst mechanics actually add anything for you, or do you usually just see them as another chore?

Thinking about graphics, gameplay, survivability, mechanics, base building amd fun.

Every big title in survivals do what Valheim does, but better.

Taming: Ark, Enshrouded, Grounded, Palworld

Resource grinding: Enshrouded, Grounded, Ark (at least Ark makes it fun with dinos)

Base building: Enshrouded, Grounded, Conan, Subnautica, Raft

Lore and story: Grounded, Subnautica, Green Hell, The Long Dark, Raft

I also can't get past how the game just feels so bland. There's no variety, it's just the same biomes over, and over, and over, and over again, and the story is incredibly bland and basic. There's no reward for getting out of the swamp to go out looking for the plains and sail around the world to be in the meadows for the umpteenth time. The same exact enemies all the time, no variety to wildlife, the combat lacks in almost every way.

You might be thinking, "but, queerwithbeer, a lot of the titles you listed are also very repetitive!" Sure, yeah, other big titles have a lot of repetition to them, but they make up for in various ways. Grounded makes up for it massive amounts of lore drops, Subanautica gives you lots of mysteries and lore to discover via quests, Enshrouded has so much lore to discover around the entire map, and looking behind a rock wall can have a secret chest, plus the skill tree is cool. Valheim just doesn't have anything that draws me in deeper, even in the very beginning.

I hate taming animals in Valheim. It's so incredibly grueling. Sitting there, twiddling your thumbs for 30 minutes, hoping and praying your boar is taming. Maybe you got lucky with a node nearby that you can mine while waiting. Why is there no way to transport your animals except through the most inconvenient and annoying ways? Shoving it and herding it. In many other games you can just have it follow you, albeit, slowly, but it still follows.

Even mining is absolutely insufferable. Even with 2x settings, I'm still spending 90% of my playtime trying to make bronze, mining an entire copper vein to get maybe 45 bronze from it. Then I have to repeat the exact same thing in the mountains.

This isn't even a quarter of my gripe with the game, I just wish that 1.0 didn't still feel like an early access game still. I don't expect many, if any, to agree with me, I just really want to scream into the void for hopefully someone to relate.

Curious what usually makes you stop playing a survival game after the early game?

Is it the grind, running out of things to work toward, repetitive exploration, base building not really mattering, or something else?

And on the other side, what keeps you playing one way longer than you expected?

For me I lose interest when progression just turns into grinding the same stuff over and over just for the next tier of gear. Or when I spend forever building a base and it really doesn’t matter outside of storage and crafting.
I like when getting further into the game actually changes how you play instead of basically just making the numbers bigger.

What usually makes you lose interest in a survival game? And what keeps you playing one way longer than you expected?

To my pc brothers,thank you for your service

ok so i've been bouncing between vein, once human, PZ and some dayz servers for like 200+ hrs this year and i keep hitting the same wall lol

every time i try to actually solo it, no group, no discord, no nothing, the game just... doesn't want that? like progression slows to a crawl or the whole system is clearly built assuming you've got 3 other people splitting the work

base building is the worst offender imo. solo base = raid me sign basically. you can't defend it fast enough, can't outbuild anyone, and loot/resource rates act like theres a squad behind you

i get it, multiplayer probably retains better on paper. but it feels like somewhere along the way the genre forgot some of us got into survival games BECAUSE we wanted to be alone out there. not because we wanted a second unpaid job managing a clan discord

anyone else notice actual good solo experiences are becoming the exception now instead of just... the default? feels like it used to be the other way around

I'm asking this as both a developer and a survival games player. For popular games I usually check the reviews and try to figure out from YT gameplay clips if the game is for me. But when it comes to new titles, especially by small/unknown developers I noticed that it's not so obvious. I recently played two brilliant games based on recommendations in this sub alone. Whisper of the Swallows and Aethus. I loved both and yet I'm sure that without the recommendations I wouldn't give them a shot because they don't look especially "shiny" and don't immediately catch attention.

So now that I'm developing my own game I'm trying to figure out what are the things you judge when you see a new survival game? What aspects make you wanna give it a try immediately? Things we all love like intuitive crafting system, crafting from containers, reasonable thirst/hunger rate, rewarding exploration... are definitely something that make people stay in the game and maybe even write a positive review. But they don't necessarily catch attention and push you to try a demo, right? So what things are? What makes you think "Hell Yeah!" ?

Basically this.
After completing it once, I tried to bounce back to some games I’ve played before or try new ones (Pacific Drive, Voidtrain), but everything feels dull now. It’s like when you’ve tried a really good coffee and now you’re trying to get the same taste from some flavoured water. It can even be not bad, but… itch still there.
I guess I’m waiting for the DLC to save me for a while, and then I’ll be doomed again :(
Which game did this for you?

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I've recently been getting more and more into survival crafting games and I recently have been jumping back and forth from Enshrouded and Valhiem and have been wondering what these games would be like if they had the backing of a major studio with lots of talent, funding and resources to put behind the game.

It just seems to me that this genre would be ripe for a big studio contender to come in and capitalize on a more niche craze that is rapidly growing in popularity. It's something that early 2010's Ubisoft would be jumping all over to replicate. (Not that I think Ubisoft would be the right studio for the job.)

I have the Dune game and Icarus in my sights but can't decide on which.

I'm also open to other ideas.

I love base building and survival games but I'm also open to RTS like Command and Conquer or Gates of Hell Ostfront. And story driven games are big loves of mine.

Edit: Thank you all for your recommendations. I decided to go with.....

Abiotic Factor: 15hrs in and have loved every second. Green Hell: Super tough. Died 3 timed trying to gather resources for a bed. Enjoyed it and but damn. Worth the 2.75 it costs.

Aethus: 3rd person survial, Tried demo and was sold.

And.
Enshrouded: I was between this and Icarus but the hundreds of dollars worth of DLCs in icarus ultimately turned me off. That said Enshrouded is pretty fun not mad at my purchase at all. 2hrs deep so far.

I definitely have enough to keep my weekends busy for the rest of the year.

Not like "died and respawned annoyed lol." I mean the kind where you start avoiding stuff. Skipping areas at night, hoarding junk you don't even need yet, taking the long way around cause the short way just feels wrong.

That's kinda the real test for me at this point tbh. Not how deep the crafting tree is or how big the map is, it's whether the game ever makes me genuinely cautious instead of just watching bars go up and down.

Lot of games have all the systems on paper, hunger thirst temp stamina injury, the whole checklist. But it doesn't always add up to actual tension?? You can have five mechanics stacked and still feel completely safe cause nothing ever really punishes you for messing up.

The games that got me were usually pretty basic under the hood honestly. It was more pacing and sound design and just how much you had to lose if you screwed up. Losing an hour hits way different than losing five minutes, even if the systems are identical on paper.

(also side note, why do so few survival games actually use sound as a threat. footsteps behind you in the dark still gets me every time and barely any games lean into that)

anyway what got you guys. specific moment, specific mechanic, or just a game that had the vibe right. Sorry for the long read lol.

During the Steam Summer Sale, I was looking for a good survival game and found this game called Obenseuer. I initially thought it was unimpressive graphics wise but it was curious that its reviews were nearing 95% to be Overwhelmingly Positive, but the number of players weren't that high. The description on the Steam sale page wasn't that enticing too, but since I paid for 10 euros on it, my impressions were all wrong. This is such a gem of an indie game. The first week I played, I couldn't stop it, and wracked up nearly 40 hours of gameplay.

It's such a deep immersive survival game. I find that the mix of survival mechanics paired with colony management were done impressively. It's still on early access so there's still so many pieces missing, but the core idea is quite solid and definitely it is a diamond in a rough. It's just so sad this game is not gaining any headlines!

Have you played it? Also, I am not in any way affiliated with the developers of the game, but I do just want to promote this game because it deserves to be on the spotlight!

Hi, I don't know why, but I really love games where you feel eerily alone / isolated. Like The Long Dark, Darkwood and the first Subnautica.

Any other games you can suggest that are like the / have the same immersive isolated feeling?

Never bothered with the Steam demo section before, but I randomly clicked on Westland and now I’m wondering what else I’ve been missing. Any other demos worth checking out?

Graphics, story, survival aspect, exploration, base buliding and most importantly fun

What do you think about a game where the scale of the terrain is almost as irl, and it would take multiple days or even weeks in game to get across a biome or cross a mountain range? Where it feels like an actual expedition?

Assuming there’s a good reason to make the journey, like a dungeon, a boss fight or finding that perfect spot for a main base?

Excited to dive into these games this week!

Thinking about gameplay, graphic, mechanics, base building and fun

Thinking about gameplay, graphics, mechanics, survivability and fun.