The Isle video essay - Experimenting with the survival formula

I just had to come and rewatch this for the Dinos vs Robots Steam event.

looking at this video now reminds me what they took from us.

I’d personally argue that Project Zomboid deserves to belong in the Basebuilding category, as you can survive upwards of years if you’re capable enough. (I am not capable enough, my longest run is 4 months.)

Thinking about it, a reason for a lot of survival games to go towards the base building aspect is because it is simply human nature.

Humans, by our very nature, dont simply adapt to our surroundings, we force our surroundings to adapt/change to suit our needs.

Ironically enough, thinking about it this way makes pure survival games less realistic (in a way) than their base building cousins. Even if sometimes you can build yourselves to (basically) godhood/immortality unless pvp is involved.

Tired of gun guy games, finally going dino

What sells me on The Isle is what turned me off survival games.

Loot hoarding. You'll be clinging to life and come across someone with 100 of everything in the game just killing for fun. That leads to spawn killing.

1100 hours on DayZ and the best gunfights I've had are in spawn towns with full kitted players

Anyone seen 'They're Made of Meat'

Yet another banger video, keep up the great work!

From a young age I’ve always wanted to make a game where bio engineer a bacteria to take over an environment as other players do the same

I love the pun of, "Grobasaurus" hinting to the twist of The Isle, before it's revealed... 😹

Another neat idea that unintentionally comes out of The Isle is innate factions. Based on your spawn pick you now have a faction that you are not only incentivized not to turn on, but innately given a desire to partner and work with. This goes doubly so for herbivores, who gain literally nothing by betraying their own factions. It creates pack mentality, even if you're playing alone, which is something few games have even attempted let alone succeeded at, and is again most likely completely by accident

Hey Soviet! There are non-extinct animal survival games coming out now! The Wilds lets you play as animals in the North American wilderness. And Animalia Survival and Primal Earth let you play animals on the African savannah.
There's also another dragon survival game being developed. It's called Draconia.

coming to this vid made years ago, and seeing Ring of Elysium mentioned makes me sad, as RoE Closed its doors last december

Sadly I believe missed The Isle's hayday. The game this video describes is EXACTLY the game I would love to play. If any community roleplaying servers, like the ones Womble described, still exist, PLEASE I am begging you let me know where to find it 🙏🙏

Would love a fantasy medieval game where the “predator” players are monsters like vampires, ghosts, zombies and demons. Keep the primarily melee focused combat but add in that beautiful dnd like taste to the “survivors”

I can smell TierZoo

There's this roblox "dinosaur simulator" from years back that has the flying, swimming, and land creatures AND the "rain makes the water rise and can strand land players" stuff. I wouldn't say it has "Twist B" figured though since like bermuda there's excess meat just spawned constantly. I'm remembering it now and wondering if the roblox game led to the development of bermuda or the opposite.

I'd like you to inspect "Rain World" if you ever find the time, I think it is an excellent game that could be understood as classic survival if I understood your essay correctly :D.

I did buy The Isle about two weeks after this video released. I played for like 10 hours on legacy, but evrima was a game changer. I put about 150 hours in, most of it since Gateway released.
The game just keeps getting better. I love that you can now climb trees, sit and walk on branches and jump from one to another. I'm always excited when they drop a new update.
Without your video i would probably never learned about The Isle!

I love to imagine this is exactly how dinosaurs would've reacted all them years ago

You should try now to play again The Isle, but play the Evrima version. Its a different approach to the original concept of The Isle.

Coming back to this years later. I feel like this is why the RP servers for GTA5 are so popular. The isle (when done correctly ["correctly" is subject to interpretation) is essentially really banking on getting into your desired roles, and acting as part of a bigger story. Also makes me think of Ready Player 1 (the book) with the movies you could act in, and present lines and actually become a part of the movie itself.

That's the problem with the profit motive. It doesn't inherently encourage innovation or creativity, it encourages people to chase profits above all else, and business often doesn't align with the ideas and goals of art.
It actually discourages innovation by the avoidance of losing money. People will coalesce around wherever the most money is instead of taking risks by trying out fresh ideas or making art for art's sake; and once they have control of the money, they'll defend it by creating a monopoly and stifling competition.

Hm... what about a kind of evolution to the base idea with a morbid farming system for other players put in?

Say you have three species, normal humans, predatory mutants and highly evolved aliens or machines. And they're on a desolated and post-apocalyptic world that's been ruined by war or something. Days are sweltering, night are freezing, there's really weird weather and all sorts of alien environmental factors.

Humans are the lowest rung of the ladder and experience the typical format of a survival game where you look for loot and eventually build a base. You can fight other humans for resources or space, but the other two races are in-built environmental stressors that kind of quietly encourage cooperation to a limited scale (not enough resources to sustain a truly massive group, so you'll more see camps of a limited player number scattered around the world. Maybe occasionally these camps need to fight for resources but more often than not would be encouraged to aid each other or at least not fight each other with the other factions present.)

Mutants are hyper-carnivorous, physically enhanced monsters that would have a gameplay loop similar to predators in the isle, feeding on wildlife and smaller NPC entities until they've grown to a certain degree that only human player characters can sustain them. They cannot use tools or weapons but are fast, very strong and can endure more damage than a human. Probably have altered eyes that cannot see well in daylight (Almost blind with how bright it is for them) as well as a burning hot metabolism so they need to stay cool, so they hunt at night, or during altered weather patterns they hunt during the day if the sun is blocked out and the temperature is low enough.

Then the synthetic/alien faction are essentially the apex faction of the game. They need bio-fuel for either themselves or their systems, so they almost immediately need to seek other players as a resource as the NPC creatures of the map would be negligible for their uses. But the twist could be that (for some reason in-game, not certain sure) a highly experienced and well-learned, well-equipped player that's survived at length would be their ideal targets. Maybe they could convert them to one of their own, maybe they offer vastly higher fuel levels or some other super rare resource this faction needs. It would almost encourage a morbid kind of paternal alliance towards human camps, cultivating players within to a sufficiently developed level and then harvesting them. The human player would be aware of this (or at least the population would learn before too long) so it becomes a kind of gaming of the system between the two?

Idk, probably a terrible idea that would fall apart in implementation, I'm no game dev. Just seems like an interesting twist or at least evolution of the player ecosystem thing to me.

I swear to god that part with the doofy looking dino reminded me so much of strange wilderness

Whats the point of those videos

It's been said a few times by other people, but most big developers play it safe with what they know works whereas indie developers tend to go rogue trying other things and new concepts.

That's precisely why nowadays indie developers make successful gamers and big corporate developers make bland crappy games.

Take Undertale, Helldivers 2 (in the beginning), Black Myth Wukong etc. made not by large studios but made such a hit in the gaming scene. Meanwhile Ubislop can't even make a game that works or isn't full of DEI.

I would like to see the environment changed by using heat maps of the common areas that the omnivores and herbivores live in. So seeds and plants are more commonly found and dispersed in highly populated areas. Or over feeding leads to desertification. It would make the map dynamically change.

I love how universally disliked Dondi is. I have legit never come across anybody that has encountered him that has anything good to say about him. Shame, cos The Isle is a great game (legacy and the beta).

It would be interesting to watch womble play path of titans as of how much it has improved from the time of this video coming out

Survival Roleplay? perhaps?

3 years later I wonder how did this branch of survival games develop. Was there a game that has been more successful than The Isle?

HAHAHAHHA YESS YESS IVE BEEN PLAYING THE ISLE SINCE WE ONLY HAD LEGACY AAAA

I tried to go check this back out a few months ago, and even though I went back and forth through different versions of the game, all I could find were servers that were so shatteringly broken that you could barely walk

Womble is the poshest chavlad I've ever seen. Blimey.

And yeah, I am a Digby/Chinny/Quebec w/ a Cy twist kind of bloke. Luckily, I'm 6'2 and 15st (fuck off with your euro kg bullshit, womble. 100kg) so I am, at 45, still growing.
Measure a fish by length alone again and I'll be finding you for a 'quiet chat' about angling. Fishing is lbs or nothing. Forget whatever your hippy parents taught you, lad.

The Long Dark is my favourite survival game, but that statement is misleading because I don't enjoy most survival games. I couldn't put my finger on why but seeing your graph, I get it. It's in a category of survival experiences that are getting rarer, with fewer and fewer games. I did enjoy Subnautica and Raft but they're not games I want to replay. I have over a thousand hours in The Long Dark, countless deaths (and with a permadeaths system, oh boy do they count) and I still play nearly every day. Now I understand why TLD is in my top 3 favourite games of all time, but I wouldn't call myself a survival genre fan

Looking back on this, I am very surprised no one has made something what I would call, the TierZoo survival genre. Different servers, different player driven ecosystems with their own difficulty, whether you wanna take it easy in the overgrown Amazon, with abundance of both plants and meat-filled players. The Labyrinth-like complexity of Non-abandoned Urban Cities, with NPC Humans that really don't want you, some form of Rodent or wild animal, in their homes, so you're forced to rummage through their garbage instead. With the Highest difficulty servers being the South and North poles, No fauna, flora, forced to be an aquatic adept creature else you'll be turned into paste by the Polar Bear mains. It's an untapped goldmine that no dev has touched, and those who have noticed, doesn't have the tools or the skills to hack at it for profit.

Man you do and play all the things i do lmao

I admittedly have the "well hello" bit from Dragon heart befire the chase began :)

I made a college presentation on simulated biology in videogames like a year ago. It's a shame that I didn't find this video prior to doing it because it's such an in-depth analysis of it that I could go so much farther in the theory with your video alone. What I'm trying to say is Well Goddamn Done.

10/10 for Slig music

“Where the populations through betrayal and dickery are just paranoid mess of twitchy players” - there you described human society, although more of pre-indistrial level but anyways. And it might as well be because of ranged weapons, who knows?!

Uh, The Isle also has specific foods needed to grow your dino and they vary between the species. So nothing new in Bermuda, as you say.

pretty sure spore came before all those but nice work on the research

this game seems neat