Suvival Games - Are there too many!
Ive been playing a lot of roguelike/survival style games as of late but the question is really are they getting out of control. We saw a very similar problem a couple of years back with another genre, the FPS genre, with the likes of Battlefield, Call Of Duty along side others taking quite a lot of the shelf space. (This will be a long post, apologies in advance)
This is starting to happen again with the feature genre of this post, the Survival style game. It really started back in 2012 when the first major game of its kind came out, and this was DayZ but the ArmA 2 mod. This really hit the gaming world by storm despite being incredibly broken on launch it proved to be an incredibly engaging game that thousands got on board with. It soon received quite a lot of attention when websites such as Eurogamer and Kokatu posted features on it describing it as one of the best zombie games ever created.
So where does the genre really originate and why has it become so popular recently, well some will argue Zombie games really took off with Resident Evil 1 back on the Playstation 1, from there the survival horror genre took off and then worked its way to rogue like games, however the roots of these genres go much further back than this.
We really have the likes of Doom and Corpse Killer to thank for bringing a Zombie style game to the forefront, in the early 90's these really took off, Doom in particular whilst not a Zombie themed game, this did have a significant number of them in. Even some adaptations of Wolfenstein 3D had zombies inserted instead of Nazi's to censor the game.
The survival horror side of things was around for far longer, the "idea" of survival horror dates back to late 80's adventure games, where plots would often put characters in a place where they had to scrounge for items in order to make survival a possibility.However Resident Evil on the Playstation 1 in 1996 was really the first game to get the tag of "Survival Horror"
Resident Evil arrived, and Survival Horror hit the mainstream, the formula for this game didnt really change a lot mainly because of online gameplay not being in the mainstream like it is now, and the fact that technology hadn't really progressed enough to allow vast worlds and big ambitious projects. Resident Evil at the time really was a game changer back in 1996. After Resident Evil we started to see more Zombie themed games, Silent Hill (to some extent), Alone in the Dark, Evil Dead made a re-appearance, Legacy of Kain (even he had a dead form) etc etc.
In 2005 the genre took a massive turn in the direction we are in now, a massively popular modification came out, this mod is known as Killing Floor.
Killing Floor really was the first of its kind in many ways:
A) It brought Zombies to the forefront of online gaming
B) It made survival a key factor forcing players to work together or fight to survive
C) It was the first game to really introduce a risk/reward system to Survival Horror, do you risk those extra kills for the extra money just to get those better weapons, or do you play it safe and ensure you stay alive with your team.
This in turn paved the way for more games of its nature, Dead Rising and Dead Island being the first games to take the Survival Horror genre out of its linear format we had seen previously, putting the decision on the player to decide what is to be done next.
Dead Space then took it to another level with its limb dismemberment, introducing strategic shooting to the mix. Then we have Left 4 Dead which really popularized the genre on the pc then again on console with Left 4 Dead 2 which took off quite well on the Xbox 360.
The genre becoming popular really is a culmination of great games over the last 10-20 years bringing it very much into the mainstream, which is not a bad thing....or is it?
So all this brings me to the question I originally stated, have Zombie/Survival Horror games gone nuts, are there too many and is the genre now saturated, the answer is simply yes. Developers are making exactly the same mistakes they did in the FPS era, seeing potential cash pots and trying to get a slice of the pie. Infestation Stories or WarZ as it was originally known is the very definition of things i'm talking about in this post. DayZ now has a standalone which is insanely broke, Rust has been in Alpha for a year on Steam, Miscreated (which runs in the cryengine so its not like they had to develop everything from scratch) looks like its never getting out of Early Access, the only positive experience iv'e had with a game like this recently is The Forest which actually has a development cycle that's clearly visible.
However, my moan continues, the effects of this saturation has now had an impact on offline experiences too, Resident Evil 6 was all action and no Survival Horror, Silent Hill Homecoming was very bland, Fatal Frame on the Wii U was bland (but still a good game), Five Nights at Freddies saw a very short time in the spotlight until they released the sequel which was complete ballox and clearly a cash cow of a game.
Will the zombies eat us all alive, or will they die with starvation, the answer to that question lies in the developers hands but the future is looking very bleak in its current trend.
As always feel free to comment, im always up for a discussion, and thank you very much for reading this, I will be streaming H1Z1 pretty much from launch on the 15th January, I genuinely am excited for this prospects of this game, so not a complete moan above, and some of the games spoken about I really like, Dead Space in particular.
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