Blizzard has announced a new survival game out of nowhere. Yes, that’s right: the creators of World of Warcraft and Diablo are now working on a whole new genre. MeinMMO editor and survival expert Benedict Grothaus believes that it couldn’t be better.
So far, not much is known about the new project. Blizzard announced the new survival game without features and without a name. The studio is still looking for employees.
At least some details of the announcement already hint at features and content. It is quite likely to have a multiplayer mode set in a fantasy setting. Furthermore, it is already in a playable state, which doesn’t mean much.
There isn’t much more known yet. And yet I am convinced that this survival game is exactly the right step for Blizzard. After dwindling interest in WoW and the major sexism scandal of 2021, the game studio desperately needs some good news.
The new project is on the right path to provide such news. And not, although it is not set in the Warcraft or Diablo universe – but exactly BECAUSE it is not.
Especially the survival genre, which Blizzard has yet to explore, is a good step. There is still plenty of room for growth, as the area is completely open.
Hardly any genre has as much potential as survival
Among the games on Steam, survival games have some of the most players across all genres. The top 10 regularly includes Rust with 90,041 players on average and ARK: Survival Evolved with 63,752 players on average, both from January 2022. So the interest in these games is there.
Even new survival games always achieve at least initial success. Myth of Empires, for example, which was released at the end of 2021, was immediately popular on Steam. It has since disappeared due to a lawsuit, but despite the issues, it had over 28,000 simultaneous players on Steam (via steamcharts).
With good features and ideas, survival games can keep their players for years. This is shown by hits like ARK, which is already planning a successor, and games like DayZ, which originally started as just a mod.
If an existing studio ventures into this area and works on completeness from the start, there is a lot of potential behind it. There are enough survival fans; you just need to mobilize them and convince them. The competition is not necessarily large.
Perhaps the most convincing argument is that the biggest and most successful survival games are actually all indie games. They are often standalone projects that succeed without a publisher despite rather small teams:
- Rust is, at least on Steam, the biggest survival game
- ARK follows closely behind, also has many fans on PlayStation and Xbox
- DayZ has been a hit for years and was originally just a mod for ARMA 2
Although all these games were in early access for years or had a half-hearted release, they are at the top. They are all still not “finished”; players often complain about bugs. Nevertheless, they can attract tens of thousands of players and retain them.
Even Valheim, released in 2021, is an indie game and was so successful in a very short time that the developers had to shift their plans almost embarrassingly. Valheim was initially developed by just 5 people and reached 1 million players on Steam shortly after release. The game still needs to be completed.
This works, as shown by Conan Exiles. Even if the game is not one of the “Big 3,” it is successful. Not least due to the Xbox Game Pass, it has likely attracted even more interest. Conan Exiles has already saved its developer and publisher Funcom twice.
A new genre yet still not entirely foreign
The decision to make a survival game may sound strange at first. After all, Blizzard is THE game studio for strategy games and created the MMORPG that was for a long time the largest in the world.
But this is where the studio gets its expertise. If the survival game is an MMO, as I strongly suspect, Blizzard can draw on experience with multiplayer and server technology from World of Warcraft.
In terms of looting and leveling, they are ahead with Diablo and WoW and will certainly manage to create a good incentive to play. Warcraft itself also shows that exploration and storytelling are strengths that can be transferred to the new game.
You can think what you want of the latest WoW lore, but overall it is excellent. No other MMORPG in the world has such a well-developed background. At least when it comes to the intertwining of story and gameplay, one can draw on experience here.
A Warcraft or Diablo setting would be more of a hurdle than something that would help. The new game would constantly have to compare itself to the old ones and would not have the opportunity to fully unfold.
And that new games also suit Blizzard, they have shown with Overwatch. Even then, there were confused looks. A shooter from Blizzard? But it worked – and continues to work to this day.
I only see positive news in the announcement of the survival game and hope for one of my favorite game studios that they succeed.
Another project by experienced developers who are also trying their hand at the survival genre is Nightingale. Created by BioWare veterans known for RPGs, a preview of the new game is coming in 2022:
