Survival games seemed to have a small budget.

AAAMEOW · June 2021

I was browsing google. It says Ark survival evolved have a budget of 2 million $. Valheim was made by a team of 5 developer.

Seemed pretty crazy consider how most mmorpg are much more expensive.

AugustusG · June 2021

For what I saw of survivals, game mecanics do the tricks and it dosen't need that much of content compare to mmos.

cameltosis · June 2021

ARK is the only survival game I've played a lot of and I only got into it this year. I feel like the game has had a lot more investment since it's initial early access release, certainly they've had a ton of sales, but as I wasn't around at the start I dont know what it was like originally.

The main thing I'd say, based on plenty of dev interviews, is that systems are a lot quicker and cheaper to implement than content. It's just that systems are much harder to design and finding devs capable of implementing them is hard.

So, a game like Valheim, for example, is nothing but connected systems. Systems for procedurally generating the worlds. Systems for combat. Systems for building. Systems for crafting. The actual content side of things is very small, with low quality graphics making a lot of that content much quicker to build.

If you compare that to a themepark MMORPG, most of the game is curated content. The majority of the dev budget will be spent on artists, animators and modellers who have to create an extraordinary amount of content for the players, rather than the budget being spent on the coders who create interesting systems for us to interact with.

AlBQuirky · June 2021

cameltosis said:

ARK is the only survival game I've played a lot of and I only got into it this year. I feel like the game has had a lot more investment since it's initial early access release, certainly they've had a ton of sales, but as I wasn't around at the start I dont know what it was like originally.

The main thing I'd say, based on plenty of dev interviews, is that systems are a lot quicker and cheaper to implement than content. It's just that systems are much harder to design and finding devs capable of implementing them is hard.

So, a game like Valheim, for example, is nothing but connected systems. Systems for procedurally generating the worlds. Systems for combat. Systems for building. Systems for crafting. The actual content side of things is very small, with low quality graphics making a lot of that content much quicker to build.

If you compare that to a themepark MMORPG, most of the game is curated content. The majority of the dev budget will be spent on artists, animators and modellers who have to create an extraordinary amount of content for the players, rather than the budget being spent on the coders who create interesting systems for us to interact with.

My experience with survival games is through Valheim. I agree here. Valheim has 1 quest: Defeat the monsters that Odin banished. The only NPC you encounter, not counting the "Tutorial Crows" is The Merchant.

What the devs are working on is fleshing out the systems they have in place, like more varieties of building pieces or new biomes.

What intrigues me about the game is that I feel in control of what my viking does up to me. No one (NPCs) tell me what to do or sends me along a path.

That seems to me, to be rather cost effective

AugustusG · June 2021

You're right the cost in writers for story telling is lower as well.

Brainy · June 2021

cameltosis said:

If you compare that to a themepark MMORPG, most of the game is curated content. The majority of the dev budget will be spent on artists, animators and modellers who have to create an extraordinary amount of content for the players, rather than the budget being spent on the coders who create interesting systems for us to interact with.

Exactly, the moment I hear a game has cutting edge graphics, its pretty much a given it will be very linear, and lack awesome mechanics. All the money going to artist instead of gameplay programmers.

Kyleran · June 2021

Another observation, survival games often get a pass from gamers with regards to quality, especially if in early access and sold at a discount.

Funcom must boggle how they created an expensive MMORPG in 2008 which gamers ravaged over it's launch state vs the "acclaim" Conan Exiles received seeing it was released early yet incomplete, buggy, with far less features or gameplay.

Perhaps being tough enough to play through the limited, buggy content is just another "survival" mechanic which fans of the genre look forward to overcoming.

Not me though, I despised FO76's relatively mild survival mechanics at launch and was very happy to see them dialed way back since then.

Just not the sort of "challenge" I enjoy.

Here's me "roughing it" in real life.

olepi · June 2021

A survival game is just the basic bones of a game, the systems it takes for a game. Like combat, crafting, etc.

Then they stop there, and let the players provide the "content".

Most MMO's start with that, and then spend most of their effort on the story, the lore, quests, character development, etc. So they are much more expensive to create, and take much longer.

Wizardry · June 2021

Well there is a lot more to ARK and behind the scenes than any number posted.It all depends on what you believe and what is possible or likely that happened.

I don't want to get into that again as it takes paragraphs to explain the history and what likely happened long ago and odd coincidences between Snail games original flagship game Voyage Century and offering by the Ark team up to and including Atlas.
So cutting it short i'll just say that Ark in it's entirety,the whole template and years prior work cost a lot more than any listed price tag.

Valheim was 6 people and you know what it looks like it.I would also guess it started MANY years ago as some of the models look like they were made in 1998.

So where am i going with this......

Well i think we can all agree Survival games ARE in fact for the most part low budget games.So this is the WHY i really detest all the crappy effort studios are giving us with 300 many teams,massive budgets and end up as VERY shallow games.

So what appears to be happening is studios are running up large budgets by WASTING money.Example Bobby Kotick of Blizzard and their entire board and top execs grossly overpaid.Heavy marketing budgets,you know to bs us and coerce the dummies into buying their half assed games.

"The playing experience".So these over priced games are making a LOT more assets than the low budget survival games,that is a given but when comes to the actual playing experience survival games blow the doors off of ALL rpg's.Survival games offer a BEWTTER role play experience than rpg's do.

Wizardry · June 2021

IDK what fence others are on,but for me personally i rather have LESS assets and better gameplay.
Know what else i get from the lower budget survival games,NO cash shop.Sure Ark has a seasons pass BS but Atlas does not,Valheim does not.

The big picture is that it really embarrasses the big studios for not being able to deliver an equal gaming experience with a massive increase in budget.
So i look at a guy like Kotick or the former Morhaime and think lol,good job paying these guys 30/40/50/100 million a year to deliver half assed games.

cameltosis · June 2021

Wizardry said:

IDK what fence others are on,but for me personally i rather have LESS assets and better gameplay.
Know what else i get from the lower budget survival games,NO cash shop.Sure Ark has a seasons pass BS but Atlas does not,Valheim does not.

Whilst I am with you on this one, I wouldn't say that survival games have better gameplay. Certainly the gameplay in ARK and Valheim is exceedingly basic.

I think where those two got their success from is a combination of IP (dinosaurs are cool! vikings are cool!) but mostly the building system. The games become an outlet for creativity and provide a great sense of ownership, and those two things are very rare.

But the actual gameplay is damn basic. The combat is as shallow as you can get, movement is basic, hell, even crafting and building gameplay is exceedinly basic! It's not like it takes any sort of skill to place down a foundation or build a wall! If you wanted, you could just build a big box, put all your crafting stations in it and that would give you everything you needed.

cameltosis · June 2021

tzervo said:

cameltosis said:

The main thing I'd say, based on plenty of dev interviews, is that systems are a lot quicker and cheaper to implement than content. It's just that systems are much harder to design and finding devs capable of implementing them is hard.
Is it that the systems are quicker and cheaper to develop compared to themepark-type content, or just that themepark content is more ephemeral, so you need to constantly produce huge volumes of more of it? For example, in EVE you keep playing content and systems developed many years ago. In WoW all previous expansions' content is no longer relevant outside of the brief duration of levelling of a new toon, and you need new content to replace it.

I would love to see the interviews and see how the devs of those games phrase that comparison.

So, in 2014 I spent 6 months working in QA for a games studio in the UK, and I can tell you exactly what the lead dev told me.

Systems are conceptually very difficult. You have to do a lot of research, understand psychology, see how all the systems interact with one another. Then you need a programmer with a high degree of capability and understanding of the engine.

But actual implementation is quick - you're writing a text document (code)

Content is conceptually very easy. You can either steal from real life ("I want that car in my game") or just think up whatever you want. Write a story, draw a picture, we can all understand that.

But, implementation is slow - building a single car for the game I worked on took 2 months, because each required 5 levels of detail and a few different varients that showed damage. As graphics get better, this slows down even more as each new model requires more precision, more detailed meshes etc.

I'm not sure that quite answers your question, and obviously systems and content rely upon one another and are not independent.

If you want some more concrete examples, read Raph Kosters blog entries about SWG (or his book called "postmortems", which is basically the same as his blog). He talks about systems vs content fairly frequently and gives some great examples from SWG.

Brainy · June 2021

cameltosis said:

But, implementation is slow - building a single car for the game I worked on took 2 months, because each required 5 levels of detail and a few different varients that showed damage. As graphics get better, this slows down even more as each new model requires more precision, more detailed meshes etc.

I dont understand this. So 2 months to make a car, why are there not freelance artists selling assets so people dont have to recreate the wheel (pun intended)? Are they just ridiculously priced or something?

Paying to have an army of artists making basic things, when you can just buy weapons/buildings/scenery graphic assets, then change a few colors in minutes and call it your own.

There is only a few engines out there for MMO's. What's going on in the freelance asset market?

cameltosis · June 2021

Brainy said:

cameltosis said:

But, implementation is slow - building a single car for the game I worked on took 2 months, because each required 5 levels of detail and a few different varients that showed damage. As graphics get better, this slows down even more as each new model requires more precision, more detailed meshes etc.

I dont understand this. So 2 months to make a car, why are there not freelance artists selling assets so people dont have to recreate the wheel (pun intended)? Are they just ridiculously priced or something?

Paying to have an army of artists making basic things, when you can just buy weapons/buildings/scenery graphic assets, then change a few colors in minutes and call it your own.

There is only a few engines out there for MMO's. What's going on in the freelance asset market?

There are a number of reasons why you wouldn't use pre-made assets in this instance.

The first is lack of assets available. Whilst there have always been freelancers available for hire, the asset market didn't used to be very big. Since Unreal and Unity became free to use for amateurs, the asset market has gotten a lot bigger, but it's still not what you'd call huge.

The second is quality. Like I mentioned, the game I worked on required 5 levels of detail, plus varients for damage, for each car. A freelancer would probably be able to do that for us, but it would be unlikely to be available to purchase already.

The third is licensing. If we wanted to put a Pagani Zonda in our game, we had to get a license from Pagani in order to do so. A freelancer would never get that license and so would be unable to sell the model directly. With car manufacturers specifically, they have some very odd licensing conditions! Some didn't want to show their cars damaged, for example, so the damage varients had to be toned down. Some didn't want their cars to be slower than others (ferrari were very uptight about this) so their stats had to be tweaked.

Fourth is engine and lighting specifics. I'm told that when you are creating the textures for your models, you really need the lighting to be decided first. Plus, different engines use different scales and file formats, so even if someone had already created an awesome car as a freelancer, the model might be half the size it needs to be and look wrong under the games lighting.

Finally, there is consistency. You want your entire game to look consistent throughout, but if you start using lots of assets from freelancers then consistency is harder to achieve. This can not only affect the visuals, but potentially performance too.

Dont get me wrong, big studios will buy assets off the market, and they will farm out some of the work to freelancers if it is feasible to do so. I also remember reading an article recently (i think on games industry) about "overflow" studios - literally studios of low-paid games people in places like Malaysia who get hired during crunch periods to crank out remaining assets as quickly as possible.

The company I used to work for is also doing some pretty cool things with how they build assets. They've started using lasers to map out racetracks, literally walking around the whole track to catch every bump and gradient change in order to give us a faithful 1-to-1 recreation. Saves a modeller having to build the track from scratch.

Scot · June 2021

When reviewers only do reviews of such games with friends and say "it's great with friends", you realise that your mates are needed to make up for the lack of content.

AlBQuirky · June 2021

cameltosis said:

Finally, there is consistency. You want your entire game to look consistent throughout, but if you start using lots of assets from freelancers then consistency is harder to achieve. This can not only affect the visuals, but potentially performance too.

This was where my brain went. Morrowind came immediately to mind. That whole game was a specific aesthetic. "Generic tree 1124" may not fit into the world the game designers are trying to create.

Think of how many fantasy games use dragons. Would a "couple of dragons fit all" well? Chinese based? Medieval European be better? 4 legs? 6 legs? 2 wings? Chromatic dragons? Gem colored dragons? Are all dragons the same color? Maybe Anne McCaffrey's "sex based" (Gold & Green females, Bronze, Brown, and Blue males) coloration fit better? What would fit the game best?

Rungar · June 2021

the assets are a useful starting point that can be modified to your liking. You dont have to use them as they are.

AlBQuirky · June 2021

Rungar said:

the assets are a useful starting point that can be modified to your liking. You dont have to use them as they are.

Very true, but those "assets" are now requiring work and money, right? I do agree with your point, though, that at least you have a basis that takes "less work" from creating from scratch.

MMOExposed · June 2021

I played 7 Days to Die on console for many hours. It is one of my favorite PS4 games. Lots of these concepts I could see used for a MMO.

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Survival games seemed to have a small budget.

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Survival games seemed to have a small budget.

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Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV