1 hour ago
4
You should hear the wind in the trees, and see the fear in the scientist's eyes
"I think a lot of survival games are really boring," Geoff 'Zag' Keene, founder of Deep Field Games, developers of Half-Life adjacent co-op survival game Abiotic Factor, said in a recent interview. However, despite these strong words, please hold onto your spit take for just a moment.
It's not the first time Keene's said something like it and, in fact, in the episode of The AIAS Game Maker's Notebook, he's responding to a question about when he said it to cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer back in 2024. So, please, calmly swallow your spit take liquid of choice, so I can explain why I'm reporting on something Keene originally said two years ago.
Abiotic Factor is a survival game that throws out a lot of what you find in stalwarts of the genre. Rather than building a life on an abandoned island by cutting down trees, planting crops, and using crafting benches to expand your toolbox until you've built a somewhat secure life for yourself in a virtual wilderness, you put on the pocket-protector-fitted lab coat of a scientist having a hell of a day in an underground facility going through a containment breach.
If you've played through Half-Life, the set up, at least, is a lot like the beginning of Gordon Freeman's adventure in Black Mesa. There's been an incident, everything is on fire, and it's up to you to explore the facility and try to put things right. Scavenging resources from the environment to cobble together weapons and equipment as you go.
While Keene starts from the same place in the podcast, that original quote from 2024, he takes his answer in a different direction, reflecting on a game that only came out at the end of last year. Perhaps you can guess what it is…
"I find a lot of survival games very boring," Keene continued, ignoring the future RPS writers who would need to provide context for why they're writing a news article about previously said words. "I find a lot of them... just ticking off boxes, and going through the motions. They have hunger, thirst, and all this other stuff, but they don't have anything of substance."
[If you're listening along, I'll let you in on a secret. I'm actually skipping ahead in the interview a bit here, so I can create a structural coherence to his answer that will have a more dramatic payoff.]
"I find a lot of survival games are just doing mechanics, flooding content in, and it's so meaningless," Keene continued, definitely not skipping anything out in between. "It's iterations of the same thing. I play one game and I play another and it looks different but it's got the same mechanics that I just played and no story to set it apart. I'll try out a survival game on Next Fest, my timer is 10 minutes per game before I'm like 'Eh, not interested.'"
While loaded up with stuff to do, what's missing, Keene says, is attention paid to the world. "We've all played Early Access survival game #27. [It's] in the forest with trees chopping, picking up rocks, but there's no wind or ambience in the air because it's not finished yet," Keene said. "If you're going to ship the game to the public, make sure it has some of the mood and the atmosphere. I don't know if I'm that good of a game developer, I don't think we've turned the survival genre on its head or anything, but we know how to [establish] our tone right, our mood, and the atmosphere of the game. Look at Arc Raiders, that's like 90% of the battle, getting a place that people want to exist in."
Coming from a different place, I arrived at a similar conclusion when writing about Arc Raiders for last year's Advent Calendar. Its take on a ruined Earth is somewhere I play, but often it's just a world I like to spend time in. Even with all the killer robots. There is a sometimes beautiful, sometimes mournful peace that hangs over the landscape. While there are many other extraction shooters, and several big names in the space before Arc Raiders came along, I've not found that peace playing the others. There is always a tension in the air, and, while there is a lot of fun to be had, I won't say Escape from Tarkov or Hunt: Showdown are chill games.
Also being interviewed was Henry Feltham, Abiotic factor's producer and narrative designer. He says how the team landed on two of the game's defining qualities: "The obvious ones we inverted. Being inside rather than outside, and being smart rather than strong. It doesn't take a lot to give the whole thing a completely different vibe."
I'd recommend listening to the whole interview. Not only do the developers dive into their many attempts to make the game without guns, there's also a story about DayZ creator Dean Hall pitching his game Icarus for Google Stadia while he snowboarded down a mountain.
English (US) ·