Ramble With Me
I want to open by saying this is a post meant for DISCUSSION. If you were here a hundred (or five) years ago around the birth of the Five Pillars, that’s the energy I’m channeling.
I’m sitting around browsing Next Fest demos while crafting my Speed Dating Guide to Next Fest, and I’m wondering if this is a good time to talk about genre labels – and the idea of an OpenBox RPG. This is just me spitballing ideas as I parse through hundreds of demos labeled survival, open world survival craft, cozyvival, and more.
(As to why I’m even sticking my nose into this, well, people tag me in posts, slide articles into my DMs, and drop links in Discord with a ‘this seems like a “you” thing’…)
Btw, Steam doesn’t even recognize survival as a top level genre, a genre, or even a sub-genre! We’re actually slotted in at Themes & Moods. Which is especially insulting, IMO, because you cannot fucking convince me that you have the same mood/feel to Valheim, The Long Dark, Green Hell, Raft, and Witchspire.
(Annnnnd this is me putting a pin in that rant, to trot out another day.)
Before anyone @’s me, I know “RPG” sounds weird here, but I’m not talking ‘role play’ in terms of creating character sheets and dialogue trees. For the purposes of the term/article, I mean the progression skeleton within these games.
Food gives you stat buffs instead of keeping you from dying. Gear opens up harder zones. There’s a predetermined power curve driving you forward, which to me is very much RPG DNA, even in the absence of an XP bar. If you slap that structure onto an open world sandbox, you’ve got OpenBox RPG: build, craft, get stronger, go further. Repeat.
Valheim is the blueprint.
Valheim launched February 2021, right in the thick of COVID lockdowns, and it absolutely exploded. And honestly? Good for it! It’s a solid game! I MYSELF have time in Valheim, which I know would shock some folks, but – similar to most during that time- I wanted a way to connect with friends. I don’t think that Valheim flourished because of its “survival mechanics”, which are notably lacking. It has great building, but other than that it’s really a fairly standard co-op adventure & exploration title with great art. To me, it took off because of when it launched. People were in upheaval in a post-covid world, with many folks isolated, stressed. As the spouse of a chronically ill and immune suppressed partner, we were right there in being off-kilter navigating the entire shitstorm. And Valheim, similar to Animal Crossing, was riding that wave.
A 2022 study out of Singapore looked at why Animal Crossing specifically blew up during the pandemic, and the short version is that COVID was actively frustrating people’s basic psychological needs – autonomy, feeling competent, feeling connected. Games like Animal Crossing (and Valheim!) gave those things back. One participant described Animal Crossing as “a quaint village where you can just go and exist.” To me, Valheim scratches that same itch for folks.
There’s security in following a set path: I need this tool/bench/item to get to this place, which lets me gather this specific item to craft THIS thing that I need to defeat X boss. Vanilla WoW folks, we walked this path over a decade earlier, alongside tons of folks from other titles. Valheim cashed in on that homey feeling perpetuated by games like AC and SDV – mixing every day life sim like tasks in with video gameplay. A little farming, a little gathering, a little crafting – and hey, look, it’s a bunch of friends! House Lodge party!
A Rose By Any Other..
Look at Windrose, which is blowing up right now. Windrose (formerly Crosswind) was originally planned as a free-to-play Open World Pirate MMO with PvP, so they’ve made some fairly substantial pivots. (Many titles pivot from MMO and PvP, tbh.) And it’s currently the MEGA POPULAR SURVIVAL DARLING.
A Pirate-filled, Soulslike combat, base building, naval exploration game genuinely looks like a good time! But, looking at recent articles:
GameRant: “…As an open-world survival game, it features familiar mechanics of the genre like base-building and procedural generation, along with side activities such as farming and fishing.”
PCGamer: “..You know the drill: pick up rocks, gather branches, craft a cruddy axe and a crude pick and start grinding for resources. There’s not a whole lot going on, survival-wise, that we haven’t seen in a million survival games already..”
PCGamesN: “…The loop of Windrose’s crafting is going to be familiar to anyone who has bumped into a Nightingale or a Valheim over the years. You cut down trees to get wood, smash rocks to get smaller rocks, then you use those things to make more intricate crafting stations to make… more intricate things…”
Survival has been distilled to…gathering materials/resources? That shit runs rampant across genres. Gathering materials and base building aren’t survival mechanics, they’re generic game mechanics. You remember those REALLY OLD Frank’s Red Hot commercials? Those “I put that shit on everything” ? That’s gathering and crafting. They put that shit in everything.
Survival is intentional. Building because impactful weather demands it. Gathering because seasonal scarcity is real and the game doesn’t hold your hand about it.
What’s In A Name??
Mislabeling! It’s not (just) that it annoys me, it’s that it actively fails both audiences. (It also creates FUCKING ENDLESS “What should I play” threads in spots like /SurvivalGaming, because people experience one self-titled survival title and then have a hard time finding shit that plays similarly.)
The player who loved The Long Dark searches for survival, finds Valheim in the results, buys it, bounces off it bored and disappointed. The player who loved Valheim searches for survival, finds some genuine friction and consequence filled game, has a terrible time, writes a crybaby article that survival games are lame and not fun because it was too hard. Nobody wins.
Meanwhile the tag “Open World Survival Craft” – which is what a lot of these games use on Steam – is basically a word salad. Open world, sure. Craft, fine, covered, though most fucking games have crafting. But survival? Where is the survival in many of these flagship titles? You can’t starve, you’re barely scolded for dying, the threats are de-fanged and you’re following a well defined path leading you to the next tier in a staircase towards an eventual gear/weapon pinnacle.
Valheim is a great game. Windrose looks like a great game. Dinkum is a hugely popular game (so I see by reviews?) – it’s basically Animal Crossing in the Australian outback and it knows exactly what it is! (Except for the survival tag sitting there doing nothing.)
These games deserve to be found by the people who will love them. They deserve their own identity that accurately sets expectations.
Survival means money these days, and Open World Survival Craft has become genre shorthand for a whole cluster of games that share a mechanic or two but not a design philosophy. So devs slap it on because it drives discovery, players use it because it’s the closest available language, finding survival gets progressively harder, and now every single game is survival.
To me an OpenBox RPG would trace its lineage back through Minecraft, through sandbox builders, through the kind of games where you make your own goals and the world is your playground and getting stronger is the point. Real survival games would trace their lineage back through games like Oregon Trail, through UnReal World and Robinson’s Requiem– through games where the environment is indifferent to whether you live or die and every decision has weight because nothing is going to save you if you get it wrong.
Climax
We need to create a system to define these searchable categories and give these games definition enough that folks searching can find something that plays like what they’re seeking. I’m not saying they have to be locked into ONLY specific mechanics or ideas (see, we CAN have titles WITHOUT zombies!) – creativity involves riffing on things. This is exploratory and I’m genuinely open to pushback, better names, other buckets that need coining. (I’m not deep in the RPG taxonomy world and I know it. But I know what survival feels like and I know what this other thing feels like, and they are not the same thing.)
I’d really like to see us fucking climb out of Themes and Moods, which is so vague as to be especially useless. I’d like to see someone name a title they enjoyed and folks recommend a bucket of others, without constantly pointing to the same “hot” title (Subnautica!), or throwing The Long Dark player into Dinkum, or the Valheim player into Escape the Pacific.
Advocating for buckets and labels isn’t (only) me being a pain in the ass, it’s to help players and developers. Bad labels waste good games.
Quick comment, I agree there needs to be better defining of games instead of them slapping a tag on it cause its popular or shares 1 aspect of it.
Also i think some homework for you might be interesting to see if it gets a bite. You should pop-off a message to some of those writers for those article. see if they would comment or collab in a way where both can use quotes and write ups discussing the topic on hand. share this link / post see if they would give you a comment or two on the topic. worse case they say no and write the dumb non correct, lack of picking the proper titles to the topics they write about and usually only get 1 game right and add others that do not fit at all etc etc (looking at you gamerant) anywho at a less worse they say no and at best might get a bite and more idea being tossed out to the masses, and absolute worse they steal the idea for an article and we have to go bash them publicly since it was started and suggested here and we keep proof.
What I DO find encouraging – and I appreciate the timing, because I’m working on the new Next Fest article by referencing the old NF article – is that the system does self correct by players, to an extent.
The Last Caretaker is one example, and I noticed that Winter Burrow had similar changes.