Summary

• Palworld shook up the survival gaming industry with its unique blend of Pokemon and survival crafting, capturing the hearts of players.
• Enshrouded, with its great building mechanics, appeals to those who enjoyed Valheim, even though its launch was impacted by Palworld's success.
• The survival genre is booming with upcoming releases like Winter Survival, Once Human, and Rooted, thanks to the acceptance of early access by developers.

The original publication of this article was a part of a sponsored Survival Week from Nightingale, but we've updated it to𝓰 add in our video, highlighting some of the fantastic survival games we🔯 already have this year, and that so many more are to come.

I had my eye on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Enshrouded and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nightingale as the first big online hits of 2024. But in came Palworld, an absolute wrecking ball, a complete industry challenger - a game built by a relatively unknown studio, plagued by criticism for its obvious resemblance to Pokemon. The game arrived at a perfect time - the first big release of the year post-holiday slump always seems to outperform expectations - and delivered something many people didn’t even know they wanted: a surviv🍷al crafting game with Pokemo🦩n.

Now the game is out and has sold millions of copies, it’s clear this is what people wanted. Palworld draws together several different types of players, from casuals who just want to catch Pals and build them cute little houses, to hardcore survival players and content creators who want to build the perfect, min-maxed factory to extract every bead of sweat from their suf🅺fering Pals. It certainly helps that Pokemon’s offerings for the past few years, barring Legends: Arceus, have been met with a lukewarm reception and left long-time fans craving more.

Enshrouded appeals to an audience who have played Valheim and waited longingly for a new update. Has Palworld’s launch impacted its performance? Yes and no. We’ve definitely seen a slower start to the game than expected, considering all the things it does right (a massive voxel-based world with some of the best building mechanics I’ve ever seen in a survival game), but it’s something that might change in the long-run.ꦕ Enshrouded didn’t have a Valheim-like explosion of popularity, but the core game is already fantastic, and it has a lot of time to cook in early access as long as Keen Games are up to the challenge of maintaining and pleasing its playerbase.

Nightingale is just around the corner, and is another game whose fate will be decided by its early access period. There is already a list of acknowledged fixes requested by the community - crafting from available chests in your base and improved UI both stand out - anꦑd the developers are very passionate about ongoing support via a live-service-like rollout of updates in the future.

That leaves us with three massive survival games that havꦓe been released in the first two months of 2024. This isn’t even all 𝓡the survival games planned for the year, as we’ve still got a bunch to look forward to, including Winter Survival, Once Human, and Rooted, and that’s cherry-picking. Games like Winter Survival and Rooted are more your classic survival games - cut down trees, hunt animals to survive, etc - whereas Once Human is a bizarre MMO-like zombie survival and crafting game that had an explosively popular open beta at the end of last year.

Just as an aside, we should also include Ark 2, Frostpunk 2, Pacific Drive, and Sta🌃lker 2 on this list.

Project Zomboid’s long-awaited Build 42 also arrives some time this year, a game that has proven that early access (even if it’s over a decade long) isn’t a bad thing. Build 42 promises a complete crafting rework and introduction of NPC animals, as well as the expansion of its leveling, allowing both basements and skyscrapers. The Indie Stone, the studio behind Project Zomboid, doesn’t crunch, that’s for sure. The last update for the game released two years ago—does it matter? No. The game still holds around 20,000 consistent players every single d🔯ay and has one of the most robust modding communities of any title, ever. Build 42 could be massive.

Valheim is also getting a long-awaited update, The Ashlands. It promises to finally bring a new biome with new challenges and monsters and plenty of other reworks and overhauls. This is another one that has taken a long old time to prepare by the devs over at Iron Gate. The last update for the game, Hildur’s Request, was noꦐt a major content update - but it did bring some well-received quality-of-life changes to the game.

Regardless if you’re a fan of the survival crafting genre, there’s ✃probably a game in this list - and that’s not including the other half a dozen survival games not mentioned here - that you can get involved in. It’s a survival crafting renaissance, made possible in part by Unreal Engine 5’s new kit of design tools, but also because of a growing acceptance of early access as a fundamental part of modern game design. Although all these games are ‘out’ this year, they’re not really out at all.

It has its merits, if handled correctly by the 🅰developers—creating a game in-line with community feedback is what has made games like Project Zomboid truly timeless, and it’ll be interesting to follow the progress of this year’s biggest survival crafting titles in the years to come.

Survival Week at TheGamer is brought to you by Nightingale -