Survival games are, in most instances,not easy games. They are meant to showcase struggle and hardship, but also the catharsis that comes with overcoming these obstacles. It’s a genre where even the simplest things can be a showcase of excess or talent - anyMinecraftplayer with a cake is clearly doing well, and anyTerrariaplayer with purple dye has some ingenious mix of luck and skill on their side.
So what can players do to alleviate the grim hardships that often come with survival games like starvation, drowning, freezing, or being mauled by animals? Take regular breaks? HaveStardew Valleyrunning on the other monitor? No and no. The answer is sharing the burdenswith other players, of course. But when resources are scarce and times get tough, people often show their true colors, and these games let players act as friends or foes to one another in equal measure.
Ark: Survival Evolvedis a game that improves massively once other players are thrown into the mix… usually. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, the peaks and troughs of the game are just that much more intense once you’re on a server with people that can severely and maliciously inconvenience you or make your day depending on how they’re feeling. With an incredibly deep technology tree, taming system, andbase building mechanic, it’s not hard to see howArk: Survival Evolvedhas ended up with such a thriving multiplayer community.
Tribes are the official way players can work either with or against one another. They allow players to sort themselves into factions, working towards goals like ruining the days of the people in rival tribes through raids, or defeating some of the most fearsome beasts that the game has to offer. In a large server, joining a tribe and experiencing both the co-op and PvP that comes with this is essential to survival.
Minecrafthas become so popular due to its versatility, it’s a ubiquitous, universally enjoyable game for pretty much any stripe of player. This is partially because of the game’s inherent design, and partially because, in recent updates,Minecraftdoesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be an educational sandbox teaching people about ecosystems and mineralogy or a sprawling survival RPG with monsters and dungeons. Maybe the point is it’s both of these things, and more, and all these things come together to give players looking to play cooperatively, competitively, or solosomething to do all the time.
Minecraft works whether players want to work together and pool their resources in a little commune of sorts with houses and gardens, or if each player wants to reside in their own walled-off fortress, hoard resources like dragons, and preemptively splash potion anything that so much as moves near their gates. The universality of the game pervades every aspect of it, including the options for multiplayer play.
Like a lot of survival games set in the post- apocalypse, chaos rules the day in7 Days To Die. There are no more rules, and nothing more to keep people adhering to social contracts like “don’t kill each other”. While the threat of zombies is ever present, players will have to decide if their fellow survivors are friends or foes.
The incredible array of craftable weapons in this title makes mowing down zombies with friends a treat, but it can also be just as fun to set traps for enemy players looking to raid your base or best another survivor in combat for loot.
Valheimis a brutal but fantastic survival game with a long line of advances to make andbosses to defeatas players trek forward in a sprawling, randomly generated, Norse-inspired world. It’s by no means an easy game, but the going certainly does get easier with friends involved, as it means more hands to gather resources, build structures, and of course, fight back the many threats that seek to end the player’s saga early.
But for players who have had enough cooperation, many servers inValheimoffer the ability to engage in duels with other players, allowing for tense PvP battles that can be used to air out grievances, settle disputes, or hey, get into the roleplay, decide the particular leader of the current settlement.
Conan Exilesis a great game for those looking for a more classical fantasy experience in their survival games - emulating the aesthetic of the classicConan the Barbarianbut with enough flare for the game to stand out even for those unfamiliar with the source material.
There are a plethora of PvP servers available for those who want to try their luck in combat against other players, but for those looking for a more cooperative experience, there are plenty of dungeons to delve into alongside friends.
DayZis a fantastic undead survival game that doesn’t hold the players' hands. Both of its incredible, hand-crafted maps are filled with plenty of opportunities and threats, from hordes of ravenous zombies to wild life to pre-apocalypse relics left to grow all the more ominous as time moves on. This game lets players fight or band together at will. Coming across other players in the map is an exercise of risk and reward - do you trust the other survivor, and gain an ally? Or kill them before they kill you, and take their can of beans?
Whilebeginners may struggleat surviving for long, the game’s mechanics are incredibly intuitive once learned, and the constant threat of survivors turning on players - of co-op turning to PvP when the times get tough - will keep players coming back for hours and hours.
Dead by Daylightis an iconic title in the survival horror genre, pioneering the asymmetrical gameplay style that few games have managed to capture the spark of since. In this game, players are able to survive alongside each other, cooperating against a single, terrifying threat.
But this threat is another player in their own right, taking on the identity of an iconic, terrifying horror character to slay the five survivors. PvP and co-op mesh together brilliantly in this game.
Rustis a game about survival, but also about anarchy. Playing this game can feel like you’re inflicting some kind of deranged social experiment upon yourself, where humanity is seen in its basest form, without the rules of society to constrain them. This means, in essence, getting attacked with rocks a lot, and losing any good stuff that was found to raiders.
But players can choose to band togetherand build basesor even small towns to aid one another, they can form groups and trade with other factions - everything is on the table, but be careful, because some bands of players will exclusively choose violence in any encounter.
