Serious survival challenge

Fallout 3 alternative play mode: If no one’s going to make my perfect survival game, I’ll make it myself. Here is Fallout 3 equipped with rules to make the game more like survival.

No medicines or clean foods / water

This is the wasteland. Everything is irradiated. You can’t be picking up safe medicines, foods and water. The whole idea of running the risk of getting radiation poisoning the longer you stay out on the field doesn’t work if it’s too easy to avoid radiation poisoning. Thus, Radaway and Rad-X are banned, as are purified water and the“fresh” food that can be found in Rivet City’s science lab. Stimpacks heal you way too much. You can carry stimpacks, but only five, and you can never use them for general healing. This is an antidote to an annoying quirk of the game: concussions.

When you have a crippled head, your screen occasionally goes fuzzy. It’s annoying to have fuzzy vision, so the Stimpacks are for curing concussions so you don’t have to put up with them. Fuzzy vision also means you can be blindsided by a powerful enemy. That’s hardly fair, and it’s not as if the combat is the thing that needs its difficulty increased. Substances wearing off or suffering withdrawal also makes your vision go funny, for the record. There’s nothing to be done about it, unless you choose not to take any substances. That will be hard.

The best survival game

Re an earlier post about the flaws with popular survival games like Fallout 3, here is my vision of how survival games should look.

Combat

Players should take and receive more damage per hit so that battles are shorter and require less button mashing. Firearms should be rare and deal as little damage as melee weapons. Everything should be made out of odds and ends: tea trays for shields; ash trays as projectile metal Frisbees for knocking people out; a shard of wood from a broken baseball bat for fixing things, creating leg splints for broken bones, or just used as a weapon in its own right.

Everything should have a damage or defence rating – if your weapon breaks into pieces but you have a cutting board as a shield, you could use it as weapon instead, as scarcity of items might make it the item with the highest damage rating out of everything you’re holding. Enemies have the same pathetic weapons and rarely attack from a distance. Enemies may limp away frantically rather than be killed, or cower and beg for forgiveness – whereupon you can chase them, take their stuff, knock them out, kill them or let them be as you please. This would make the world more characterful.

Day-Night cycles

Since it became possible to have an inbuilt clock in games, time has become something of an obsession with developers. They sit around big tables, asking: “Should we have real-time?” or “Should we have a minute represent an hour? Or five minutes? It must all be consistent, or no one will find our game immersive. We can’t have people not being immersed!”

So began the tedious business of having day-night cycles in games, with night time that lasts as long as daytime. Games that work in real time like Animal Crossing and are at least predictable; if it’s night in real life, the game world will be in night mode, where you will have much the same restrictions as you do in real life. You can’t pop to a friend’s at one in the morning, or go shopping at 10pm. I’m fine with this because it does give you a sense of being in a kind of second life; there is a routine, there are rules, there are habits and patterns, you must learn them and follow them if you are to get everything you want to do today done. The same is true for non-real-time life sims such as Harvest Moon.