Especially after Palworld, the death of Blizzard's survival game makes me yearn for a AAA take on PC's most vibrant genre

Jan. 26, 2024

Opinion| It’s wild that there are still barely any AAA survival games

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The sheer, enduring popularity of the genre makes the decision to cancel Odyssey - a game that so much time, money, and effort has been put into - a baffling one. Even more surprising are the circumstances around its failure. A report fromBloombergstates that Odyssey suffered as a result of “technical issues” surrounding its game engine. Blizzard executives reportedly chose to switch away from Unreal Engine, moving to an internal engine that the company had primarily developed for mobile gaming.

The decision behind that is said to have stemmed from Blizzard’s desire for Odyssey to support 100 players on the same map at the same time, but it led to extreme slowdown on the project, with Bloomberg reporting artists would have to prototype work in Unreal, knowing that it would be “discarded” rather than transferred to the new engine.

I won’t pretend to understand the complexities of game development, nor to suggest that the loss of any single game is worse than the lost livelihoods of nearly 2,000 developers. But the fact that a new Blizzard IP in a perennially popular genre would be left to suffer through development like this is truly astonishing. And while Microsoft as a whole might borrow some survival game credit from its ownership of Minecraft and the existence of Grounded and State of Decay, the treatment of Odyssey is, to me, indicative of the AAA industry’s lack of respect or appreciation for one of the most successful genres in the world.

Survivor

Of all the top-rated survival games on Steam, not a single one comes from a major developer (unless you count the survival tags added to games like Resident Evil 4 and Dying Light). And even when we look to games like Grounded, Minecraft, or State of Decay, we find games or series that were already successful - or at least in active development - before Microsoft bought the studios that were making them.

There are myriad reasons why a major publisher might steer away from survival games: these are titles unforgiving enough that they’re thought to not appeal to the mass market; they’re complicated to make and balance without relying on early access, which big studios tend to steer away from; and they often require years of support but are hard to monetize in the long-term. I also wonder whether a proud legacy of early access jank has soured executives on the very idea of survival games - these are projects that tend to look and feel a certain way, and that way is not the kind of high budget blockbuster that major studios tend to pin hundreds of millions of dollars on.

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Yet it remains the case that these games can be defining hits. Valheim is still a notable cultural touchstone in this genre. I imagine Palworld has already become something similar. Not all of these games hold attention forever, but the ones that do are still boasting massive player counts the better part of a decade after their original releases. Yet one of the only truly high profile AAA attempts to to break into the genre has been scrapped. The developers who poured years of their lives into Odyssey deserved better, and I’m sure that the passion and hard work they expended would have created something excellent, whether or not they could fit 100 players into a server. But in the increasingly risk-averse upper echelons of the industry are people who don’t see the promise in a genre that consistently beats expectations, and now we might never know what a Blizzard-grade survival game would have looked like.

For now, here’s our list of thebest survival games.

I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.

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