A survival game is now the only right decision from Blizzard

Blizzard has announced a new survival game out of nowhere. Yes, right: the makers of World of Warcraft and Diablo are now working on a whole new genre. MeinMMO editor and survival expert Benedict Grothaus thinks that it could hardly 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 indicate features and content. It will almost certainly be multiplayer with a fantasy setting. Besides, it’s already in one playable state, which doesn’t mean much.

There is nothing more. And yet I am convinced that this survival game is exactly the right step for Blizzard. After dwindling interest in WoW and the big sexism scandal of 2021, the game company urgently needs good news.

The new project is going in the right direction to provide just such news. And not even though it’s not set in the Warcraft or Diablo universes – but precisely BECAUSE it’s not.

In particular, the survival genre, which Blizzard has not explored so far, is a good step. Because there is still a lot of room for improvement here, the area is still completely open.

Hardly any genre has as much potential as survival

Among games on Steam, survival games have one of the most players across all genres. Among the top 10 are found regularly Rust with 90,041 players on average and ARK: Survival Evolved with 63,752 players on average, in January 2022. So the interest in the games is there.

Even new survival games always have at least an initial success. For example, Myth of Empires, which was released in late 2021, was immediately popular on Steam. It’s since disappeared there due to a legal battle, but despite the issues, it has over 28,000 concurrent 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 sequel, and games like DayZ, which actually only started as 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 have to mobilize them and convince them of yourself. Because the competition is not necessarily big.

Perhaps the most compelling argument is that the biggest and most successful survival games are actually all indie games. There are often independent projects that are successful despite rather small teams without a publisher:

• Rust is the biggest survival game, at least on Steam
• ARK follows closely behind, also has a lot of fans on PlayStation and Xbox
• DayZ has been a hit for years and was originally just a mod for ARMA 2

Although all of these games have been 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 that permanently.

Valheim, which was released in 2021, is also an indie game and was so successful in a very short time that the developers had to postpone their plans almost ashamed. Valheim was initially developed by just 5 people, but shortly after release it reached 1 million players on Steam. The game still needs to be completed.

Conan Exiles, for example, shows that this works. Even if the game does not belong to the “Big 3”, it is successful. Not least because of the Xbox Game Pass, it should have attracted even more interested parties. Conan Exiles has already saved its developer and publisher Funcom twice.

A new genre and yet not entirely foreign

The decision to make a survival game might sound strange at first. After all, Blizzard is THE game developer for strategy games and created the MMORPG, which was the largest in the world for a long time.

But this is where the studio gets its expertise from. If the survival game becomes an MMO, as I strongly suspect, Blizzard can draw on experience with multiplayer and server technology from World of Warcraft.

When it comes to looting and leveling, they are way ahead with Diablo and WoW and certainly manage to create a good incentive to play. Warcraft itself also shows that exploration and storytelling are strengths that carry over to the new game.

Think what you will of the latest WoW lore, but overall it’s excellent. No other MMORPG in the world has such an elaborate background. At least as far as the interweaving of story and game is concerned, you can draw on experience here.

A Warcraft or Diablo setting would be more of a hurdle herethan it would help. The new game would have to constantly compare itself with the old ones and would not have the opportunity to fully develop.

And with Overwatch, they have shown that new games are also good for Blizzard. Even then there were confused looks. A Blizzard shooter? But it worked – and still works today.

I only see positive news in the announcement of the survival game and hope for one of my favorite game companies that they make it.

Another project by experienced developers who also dabble in the survival genre is Nightingale. Created by BioWare veterans known for roleplaying, a preview of the new game is coming in 2022:

New survival co-op game in a unique setting is coming – should mainly focus on co-op, teamwork and PvE