What a hell of a question, right? It’s one of those things that writers used to imagine about, that cartoonists joked about, and entire genres are defined by.
Now, think, what would you do in an empty world with the powers of a god?
That’s a question that we’ve found an answer to. An answer that was found in the empty worlds we created for our games.
In the previous piece, I rambled on for a very long time about Bethesda and its games.
It was needed; they have an entire game style over there that’s entirely unique to them.
And die-hard fans of Bethesda probably agree. There are no other RPG open-world games like Bethesda’s.
So, they got their own article.
But in this one, we’re going to take a nice, magnificent journey into what it is to create, play, and live in an open world game.
In this article, we’re going to cover how to survive the end of everything.
The Journey Of Being Infinite
My first experience of a truly infinite world was launching a very early, very pirated version of Minecraft in 2013.
I was a college student. I had only heard of it in rumours. But I launched and figured it out.
I died that first night to a skeleton with a bow.
I died that second night to a creeper.
The third night, I had built a hovel and just waited for the sun to rise by looking out of the hole at the top of my little square space.
The experience of almost everyone who has played these games is probably very similar.
And that is part of the beauty of open-world games that rely on survival.
Now, according to the actual Guinness Book of World Records, the first iteration of this type of game was called UnReal World, launched in 1992.
This game is really simple and has some extremely basic graphics that the PCs at the time could just about barely run.
Almost a decade later, we started getting new games in the genre, games that would take what it meant to survive in a simple open world to new extremes.
After that, we have games like Stranded in 2003, Minecraft in 2009, and Terraria in 2011.
These games are fantastic, massive, and they are what started the frantic energy of the 2010s into open-world survival games.
See, they had simple, core principles that made them different. Minecraft and Terraria are the key examples of this. Nearly infinite worlds with infinite possibilities.
Terraria sees players taking on deities with nothing but a spoon (I am 99% sure that happens).
While Minecraft sees players creating actual binary computers using the game system.
And the massive popularity of these types of games has launched the genre from obscure things people discover on Dwarf Fortress to the monumental adventures experienced by all of us.
The Genre Defining Games of Open World Survival
I could probably rant on here for hours on end and never fully explain why open-world survival games are so amazing.
To prevent your boredom and the editor from slapping me, [Eds Note: It’s too early in the year for slapping. You’re good. For Now.] I’ll go through the games that have continued to define the genre and what each of them has brought to the table.
You Best Believe In Leviathans, They’ll Eat You
The complicated mess that the creators of this game now find themselves in aside, Subnautica is older than most of us realise.
Releasing in 2018 and going into early access years before then, it’s a game that defined what it means to be scared while trying to build a base.
It took the basic idea of being stranded in a world completely open to you and literally threw it into the ocean.
Combined with a rather interesting plot, the open-world aspect of this game lends itself to every other part of it.
You don’t simply want to finish the game; you travel its world and try to discover each and every mystery that you can find.
There are millions of clips of someone leisurely exploring a new area only to be completely blindsided by a new monster.
And to top it all off, technically, the entire game is open to you from the very start.
Subnautica is the game that properly uses the openness of its world to its full advantage.
It doesn’t just have a big world for you to explore; it has a world for you to explore that makes you seriously consider what each next step in your journey will be.
You may think of starting a base where your pod dropped, and then quickly tilt into finding the most dangerous area, building a base, and showing everything there how amazing you are.
And yes, that includes slapping a Ghost Leviathan in the face with a Prawn Suit.
Early in the game, your only focus is trying to survive and get off that planet.
Then you start exploring the world, and you want to see more of it.
Eventually, you are consumed, no longer just surviving, the goal.
You want to understand the people who have been there before, the monsters that are lurking, and the history of the aliens who came before.
I won’t launch into Below Zero here, but I will end off with the thought that Subnautica leaves you with.
A survival game that has so many aspects and openness that you become entrenched in it.
Once you thrive in it, you become a master of your own oceanic world.
Like the sea monkey you are.
The Part In Which A Dinosaur Just Bit You
Ark is a game about taming dinosaurs.
It’s one of the simplest questions-to-answers games I have ever seen someone else love.
You spawn in as nothing but a naked human on a beach, with nothing but your hands and hopes to survive with.
You figure out how the game works, shout wildly to get to your friends, and then discover how to destroy a tree with a rock.
And just as you’re about to start really building something a 5-meter tall dino walks up to you and completely resets what you knew about “Holy hell, I think I just crapped by wrappings”.
I’ve only played Ark a handful of times.
My friend group online was too small at the time of the first early access release in 2015, and then its full release in 2017, to enjoy it fully.
Which speaks nothing of why it went on to be released on every console that could take it and then some.
Even getting a remastered version on newer consoles called Ark: Survival Ascended.
It’s a game with one helluva survival loop to it.
You go from being crunched on by basically everything to raiding other players.
You know, while riding atop the largest dinosaur you could grab, lugging grenades and bullets at them.
If you need to know more to be interested, I recommend thinking about this sentence:
“Your friend tamed something called a Titanosaur, and now your tribe is fighting against the other Titanosaur to decide who has supreme dominance over the ARK”
Forests, Rusty Spoons, and Zombies
I must include these games in one part; they’re very similar, yet different enough that each fan club just universally swore at me under their breath.
See The Forest, Rust, and almost every other game in the zombie-like monster area is similar. And that’s kind of why they’re so beloved.
From 7 Days to Die’s loop mechanic to Rust’s crazy things that run at you, each quiet moment is accompanied by hectic battles that shoot you up with adrenaline.
These games spawn you into worlds where the objective is not just to outlast the elements.
That’s the easy part.
No, the objective, while clear and fundamentally coded into each of us, is not always easy.
Survive.
In all of these, you never truly become the master of the world around you.
At any moment, even the most prolific players can find themselves outgunned, outplayed, or simply overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
It brings back memories of the early days of DayZ and others.
Where teams of players would roam the world and try to not just survive their hunger meter, but opportunistic players that are waiting for you to be monched on by a monster.
There are few things as heart-racing as seeing a wave of zombies heading your way, only one magazine of bullets in your pistol, and your health bar below 10%.
Open world survival, if you dare!
Want To See The Galaxy?
You may not think it, but I do consider some space games post-apocalyptic, and while it’s shiny, new, and magnificent, No Man’s Sky is the leader in what Space Survival is.
You wake up with no memories, no idea of who or where you are, and a burning ship with a computer yelling at you about surviving.
This is a game that launched to great fanfare, disappointed millions, and has now turned into the very definition of what it means to create a great game.
The truest example of: Don’t Stop Trying.
Sean Murray is still active on X, and his tweets are always entertaining and confusing, and with the latest update, The Holiday Expeditions, truly flabbergasting me.
This game, which initially lacked multiplayer, had more bugs than a Cloudflare server and was universally panned.
The game was almost an example of failed promises.
Has now become one that lets you build completely custom ships, fight friends anywhere in the universe, and experience space like never before.
Unlike so many other open-world space games, No Man’s Sky has brought survival in space from just a simple “I will try my best but likely not thrive” to “This galaxy is mine. Let me show you this funky monster I found”
What’s even scarier is that each new update brings with it new creatures, new places to explore, and expands an already impossibly large selection of stories to explore.
No Man’s Sky brings to open-world games the reality of what a dedicated team can bring to us when they truly never give up.
And underwater exploration now has gigantic sea creatures, and that genuinely frightens me.
Open World Survival
The key thing that these games do with their open world is make it more than a set piece for you to explore.
Unlike Assassin’s Creed or Baldur’s Gate 3-like games, survival games require more from you.
The very world you are in wants to kill you, and it’s your sole purpose to show why you deserve to survive.
And damn, if these games don’t deserve all the love they get from their fans. In our journey through the open worlds around us, it’s best to remember this.
Open worlds are more than the place where a story happens.
They are the biggest and most important characters in the games we love.
About Sock0Puppet:
Sock is easily one of the best gaming streaming content creators you’ve probably never heard of!
When he’s not being shot into the sky in multiplayer games, he’s a full-time copywriter, thinking about RPGs, and wondering if he’ll ever actually finish his first book.
He is an expert in nothing and a master of waffling – games and books are his thing!
