I’ve sunk far too much time into H1Z1, DayZ and other games of the new survival genre of gaming and with games such as Ark doing well and the prospect of No Man’s Sky in the future it looks like this genre is going to be a big part of gaming over the next few years.

Can there be a Survival MMORPG?

Being a Product Manager for an MMORPG I am presented with the conundrum of how to take the excitement and energy surrounding the survival genre of gaming and incorporate it into an MMORPG.

On first glance it seems that a survival game and MMORPGs are incompatible. The premise of a survival game is that you can lose everything and then start again – Of course One Life is an exception, if you die in that game your Steam account will lock out the game. An MMORPG is all about progression. Players want to grind their levels up and up. So can I merge those two concepts to make a successful survival MMORPG?

The challenge of creating emotive gaming

The feeling I get when playing H1Z1 and DayZ is very similar to how I felt during my first foray into PvP back in 2004 in Runescape. I’d be patrolling the Wilderness with my clan knowing that any white dot on the minimap might be a bigger clan waiting to wipe the floor with us – or perhaps a smaller clan… The feeling of anticipation building up in the top of my stomach and the sweat forming on my brow is etched in my memory and creating this feeling all the time in an MMORPG is key to the success of a survival mode.

Next week I get to see if I have achieved this. Back in my beloved RuneScape we are releasing a new game mode, Deadman Mode. This takes place in Old School RuneScape and has a rather… er… harsh (to put it mildly) death mechanic. To create this feeling of anticipation death had to be a big deal, dying needs to be frustrating. There are two things important to Old School RuneScape players, XP and wealth. So, when a player dies to another player they will lose 50% of their XP, everything they are carrying and the most valuable items from their bank will be taken by the player who kills them. The hundreds of millions of players that have played RuneScape will know this is a big deal.

That’s death sorted out, know we just have to put players at constant risk of death (this must be the only industry where you actively try to kill your customers). This is easy, we will make the entire game map PvP enabled.

Not killing off your subscribers

You might be fooled into thinking that the job is done. Harsh death + easy death = constant sense of anticipation right? As I mentioned earlier MMORPGs are about progression so we only want to make players feel permanently at risk, not kill them every five minutes or they won’t progress anywhere and will simply go and play something else. So, in this environment of violence where the strong survive we need to discourage players from fighting. So, when a player attacks another they will be flagged as a bad person and if they try to enter any towns the guards will kill them. Also, any player who attacks a flagged player will not be flagged themselves. Effectively, if a player attacks another they will themselves become a target.

An uneasy peace

Old School RuneScape’s Deadman Mode has two opposing mechanics; on one hand you have the ability to kill other players and profit hugely from it, on the other hand you will become a target and have a higher chance of being killed yourself.

Every time a player has the opportunity to attack another player they have to decide whether it is worth doing it. There is no way to know how much they will profit by killing a player, however they can be sure they will be at a big disadvantage if they do attack them. Will this lead to a huge amount of violence on the game map or an uneasy peace? My bet is on the latter. One thing I think we can be sure on, when a player sees a white dot on the minimap their heart will jump into their mouths and emulate the feeling felt so often in many of the survival genre of games.