Yesterday Blizzard released a recruitment pitch looking for new talent to work on a currently unannounced survival game. We know almost nothing about this other than based on the concept art provided that it appears to be leaning into a more fantasy world/through the looking glass feel. Though at this stage I am doubting you can really read much into this one. It makes sense that Blizzard would be exploring this genre because it isn’t one that they have a game in. For decades the Blizzard model has been to take a game genre that is reaching maturity, and then release a highly polished version of it that leans on the best features of everything else out on the market. If the company still has any of its magic dust left, survival is absolutely a genre that could use coalescing into a better game.
One of the challenges with survival games as a whole is there are already a good number of pillars of that landscape. Ark, Rust, and The Forest are likely the biggest players, but you have a number of smaller games that have had their own “phenomena” moments like Valheim where everyone seemed to be playing them. Most recently New World has proven that there is still a lot of interest in the genre and that folks are looking for a more complete game experience. Unfortunately also in the case of New World it has been proven that players will not put up with a crappy game experience as its player base has dwindled to a peak of just under a million players to a current peak of just over seventy thousand.
New World however is a tale of mismanagement pure and simple. From the short sighted server design, to the history of patches that destroy entire chunks of the game, to the questionable reliance on a game ethos that appears to be counter to what the players wanted. I feel like if New World were a game that could support large communities and had an interesting progression that did not feel openly antagonistic towards its player base… it would have been a multi million player game. So if Blizzard can come along behind something like New World and learn from its mistakes, then I fully expect it would be a success. Pending of course that the company is able to deal with all of its hostile working conditions bullshit in a reasonable manner.
I do however wonder if this might be one of the first changes we have seen as a result of the Microsoft acquisition plans. No matter how successful a Blizzard Survival game might be, it was never going to be a success on the order of magnitude of the Call of Duty franchise. Activision Blizzard seemed to only care about games that would be that level of success, given how many studios were lashed to the support of that single franchise. Phil Spencer has already shown interest in breaking up that Call of Duty machine and letting studios create different sorts of games. So I am wondering if this is creating an environment where it is okay to move forward with smaller games. Based on some comments from Mike Ybarra it sounds like maybe this game has been in pre-production for a bit. I just wonder if the talk of the acquisition is creating breathing room for games that might be ideal for Game Pass.
It is way the hell too early to tell if I would be interested in a Blizzard Survival game, but I will say what I am very interested in is someone making good on the potential that New World had. Amazon Game Studios has proven time and time again that they do not have what it takes to make that game a success. Proof of this comes again within the last 24 hours when a patch has broken a good number of the games systems including storage and crafting and produced at last count 267 significant bugs. In addition to actual bugs they took measures to obfuscate the player count, so that the player base would have a harder time seeing drops in population which is never a good sign. So essentially I want someone to make good on the promise of this genre and present something that is stable and designed in a manner as not to fragment the player base and prevent us from all playing together.
When a survival game is good, it is this blissful experience of exploration and discovery. When it is bad it is a frustrating skinner box designed to focus grinding of the player base and create a flytrap of forced engagement. I would love to see Blizzard bring with them knowledge they have learned from other genres and produce a leap forward in the survival game genre. I am just not entirely certain if I believe that Blizzard is still a company that can do this. Shadowlands has been a miserable experience, and I have serious doubts about if Diablo 4 is going to be the game I hope it might be. I am still holding out a glimmer of hope though that the Microsoft Acquisition will create a lot of net positive effects within the company that will ultimately improve the quality of their products.
So what are your thoughts about the prospect of a Blizzard Survival Game? Drop me a line below.
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