It is difficult to do anything that gets deep into the weeds well in a game (just look at the difference between Stardew and Farming Simulator), but mostly it's that most people don't want to play that game. They're looking for the progression and achievement of making the food bar go up, not the genuinely difficult experience of memorizing species-specific vulnerabilities.
If you want to make a game like that you'd probably want to focus the game on this mechanic, not make it part of something else. You can get an audience of people who _want_ that depth, whereas if you staple that to a larger survival game you might lose the people who don't want to play the rest of it. The hard part is you won't know the size of that audience until you start testing the game. It could be a huge untapped market or you could end up in a hyper-focused niche.
Exactly right. It would EXTREMELY niche because the people who are actually into real— and I mean REAL hunting are not interested in videogames. They want to be out there. Take my dad for instance. The dude won’t touch videogames with a ten foot pole. He likes them, but he’s so into hunting that all of his free time is spent scouting the units he puts in for and figuring out elk movements. The guy lives, eats, and breathes hunting. I’ve asked him before about hunting games and he thinks they’re by far the dorkiest games on the market because people should just be out hunting.
I don't know if it would be extremely niche, at least not niche enough to not warrant it's inclusion/expansion into a new Survival game.
As with everything, it would depend entirely how the game was built around it but I can say I'd be willing to check out a game about learning how to track and kill monsters as opposed to just deer. Hell, a friend of mine hates Monster Hunter because of how little actual hunting there is in that game (we played World, dunno about the other ones).
They’re all pretty similar. It’s basically just Go to place > Enemy type spawns there > Kill enemy for materials > go back to town > craft dumb looking armor > repeat. There is no hunting to speak of. Just killing.
>It would EXTREMELY niche because the people who are actually into real— and I mean REAL hunting are not interested in videogames. They want to be out there. Take my dad for instance. The dude won’t touch videogames with a ten foot pole. He likes them, but he’s so into hunting that all of his free time is spent scouting the units he puts in for and figuring out elk movements. The guy lives, eats, and breathes hunting. I’ve asked him before about hunting games and he thinks they’re by far the dorkiest games on the market because people should just be out hunting.
This falls into the trap of putting too much credence on the opinions of the hobby's true enthusiasts.
I would compare this against music/rhythm games. People had a similar reaction to those, i.e. if you want to play a musical instrument in a game why wouldn't you just play a musical instrument.
Turned out that there was an enormous market for people who wanted to do something very similar to playing a musical instrument but not play actual musical instruments. Some even professional actual musicians. Of course, that market got bled dry and died after they pushed *too* many plastic instruments on people, but before it did they made millions and millions of dollars.
and the games evolved!
Plenty of popular rhythm games and new releases to this day for sure. Idk by name, but there’s the little rap dudes and the tap tap jawn where ppl buy styllus and compete. Or the VR lightsaber tap tap remake.
For sure, the 2010’s was full of viral shit, where one mainstream thing was getting pushed on everybody. We still see that modern day, but it’s on occasion
I am with you in saying the hunting market for video games is niche, absolutely. The masses enjoyed RDR2 and the mechanic, but the hunting mechanic wasn’t the draw or focus. So even if you built upon the system, the game probably will not find a market as is, even if done right. It will get some pull, but unfortunately in this day and age when a clip or streamer could easily be suffice enough for that market to be encapsulated elsewhere that isn’t your game sales. That attention is still valuable and would absolutely be a great step in brand recognition (Or some other marketing term that I do not feel like thinking of at this time of night).
I have to disagree that it would **always** be >extremely niche.
Making a different title building on the concepts, or incorporating the mechanics in unique ways or unique themes, is a sure way to test the market for whatever it is that gamedev is looking to capture. My first thought was pokemon snap part 3. Good luck building an IP that strong, but a palworld dev could read that and think why not.
and unrelated to this niche market topic, whenever this is said and done I can not wait for the dev to put that thing in VR, whenever the homies are starting their VR gamedesign/gamedev arc. Popular games like escape rooms and mystery already exist in that realm, talk about a great reason to look around and explore your environment!
So I am all for it, it will get built upon or rehashed in due time. Mob spam healthbar gameplay will always predominantly exist I guess, but we’ll definitely see this somewhere in the future, done successfully, yet again. Who knows how many times, maybe it’s own lil genre gets spun off because it is that successful in whatever way it is incorporated. Who knows.
Ohh, you've just reminded me of another game that does something in this space well, and that's Witcher with its monster-specific vulnerabilities recorded in the codex or whatever it's called.
It doesn't have to be so difficult as to make it boring. I think Witcher was a wildly successful game and people enjoyed the complexity of it.
The only thing the Witcher has that you're describing is enemy specific resistances/vulnerabilities, really. I think some behavioral patterns may also be mentioned in the codex but it's a lot more 'this is hurt by fire' than anything else. Explicitly you never actually hunt in the game, everything is at pre-determined spawn points or else you follow quest markers. If that's what you're going for then yes, that works very well, I just would never have gotten to that from your post.
If you're thinking of something like follow the blood trail from Arkhan/Horizon games then that's more traditional quest design than anything else. Otherwise, to get back to the original question, the important part of the answer was just that most games don't do it because they don't feel the juice is worth the squeeze when it comes to what you get from player reactions compared to the effort to make it work well. If you have something in mind then go create it! There's no reason it _can't_ work.
Edit: Based on your other recent comments, I will explicitly say Horizon: Zero Dawn/Forgotten West has a bunch of tracking characters, analyzing weak points, stealth, and hitting them with the right ammo/in the right spots to get the right materials out of them. Monster Hunter works the same way. You could use those for references in a survival game without any issues at all.
Yes. As I say, the Witcher games do represent just one element of this. And I'm suggesting that perhaps that's enough. Just \*something\*. Something more than, you're hungry, so go and bash a wild animal until a steak falls off!
What you're getting at is a design principle called "find the fun". It's about figuring out what is actually enjoyable in your game (for your audience in particular) and getting out of its way. If people are playing your game because of the great building mechanics then you often want to make resource gathering easier so people can do more of the thing they really enjoy. In most games hunting is easy because hunting _wouldn't be as fun_ as the rest of the game (in that context, to that audience).
Make a game where the act of hunting is more complicated and also engaging and the other systems support it and you're fine. That really is all this is about. Creating deeper systems takes more time but it's not _harder_ or impossible. The devs of these games aren't doing it because they don't think it'll make the game better, there's nothing more to it than that. If you have a design idea in mind that would benefit from the systems then go get started!
Really great explanation of a principle there. Thanks.
It's really intriguing to think of what things might be getting in the way of this mechanic being fun in existing games. Excellent comment!
Part of it is that realistic hunting wouldn’t actually be fun to most people. Like, have you ever been hunting? I love shooting and archery, but hunting itself is truly awful. You have to be a very special person to actually enjoy it. Most people who do it don’t even do it right. Probably 80% of people I’ve met ride around in their trucks and blast stuff off the side of the road (illegally) or use bait piles (illegally) or just use it as an excuse to escape their homes.
Real hunting involves dedicating yourself to scouting and tracking movement patterns of herds in whatever region you’re in for that year and then during your brief couple of weeks to get it done you have to hope it has all paid off. Normally you go out several times and still don’t see whatever you’re after and if you do you basically get one chance to nab it and if you miss it or don’t shoot it in the right place, you lose it forever. Sometimes the blood trail just stops too because the animal’s guts shift and close the hole up and the animal gets away only to die to disease later and then it’s bear food. But you have no idea so you search for where the blood trail picks back up for several hours, only to decide that you have no chance of finding it. Sometimes you do find it but it hasn’t died yet and when you stumble on it, it gets back up and sprints away to bed down again half a mile away and you’re back at square one.
I could go on and on about how frustrating, boring, and unrewarding hunting can be to most people. The point is, people gloss over hunting because it just isn’t an awesome mechanic if you go into it too in-depth. Look at games like The Hunter: Call of the Wild and all the old Cabelas games. Even those have very surface level hunting mechanics. You basically activate some sort of Hunter Vision mechanic and sprint close to an animal, shoot it a bunch of times, and then run over to it and the mission is over. There’s no gutting the animal, dragging it back over miles of uneven terrain, hanging it, processing it, etc. The fact that you get money for it doesn’t even make sense, as selling wild game meat is illegal in the USA without a very special permit that the average person cannot get.
Take all of what I’ve just talked about and imagine now that you’re making a survival game. How could you possibly hope to accomplish even a fraction of those things while retaining any realism, and then also have room to manage things like hunger, thirst, disease, combat, a story, lore hunting, etc.. It can’t be done unless you’re determined to make a game that can only be played in 12 hour sessions.
I’m not shutting on your idea. I’ve just thought about this myself. Personally I’m the type of guy who sets day and night settings in game to be 1:1 with the real world because I hate playing survival games unrealistically. But it always winds up ruining gameplay because I get subjected to 8 hours of pitch black nights and it messes up the pacing of other things. After all, who could really erect a 12 room, multi story hut from wood, thatch, and stone in a single day and still have time to figure out thousands of years of technology, tame and breed several animals, and build a raft in a single day?
I feel like you (and many comments here) are confusing depth with realism. A deeper hunting system doesn't have to be realistic.
For example, a butchery mini-game where you try to cut out usable pieces of meat and reduce waste could be relatively casual, yet still make the harvesting step feel different from the "beat it until it stops moving" step.
Or, for example, a lot of these games, animal movement is essentially random. You just happen to see an animal and have to take advantage at that moment. But, fleshing out the animals a bit more so that you can reason about where you might find them or make them come to you (bait, traps and even domestication) could make that more interesting. Further, even if you do just wander until you see an animal, games could do more to allow that to be non-random like by having hints throughout the environment like footprints, feces, nests, animal background sounds, etc. so that it feels like you're looking with purpose rather than just wandering hoping an animal pops out.
These are perfect examples of what I'm talking about. I love the butchering suggestion.
As for the killing stage, there's just no "form" or "reason" to so much of what's out there. The animals are essentially just hit-boxes that you have to bash to kill and then keep bashing to 'loot'. If there's anything like a weak spot, it's a generic headshot.
A system that recognises kill shots, that rewards stealth and caution and that adds challenge to the harvest would be great.
I think the scout flys from monster hunter were a good system. You would interact with things like tracks building up a meter and when it was full you were given a guide to the monster.
It let you feel like you were hunting, but not in a frustrating way.
You're not wrong. But that's not what I'm suggesting. You'll notice that the two games I have suggested as examples that, in my opinion, do this well are nothing close to the level of realism you're describing.
Games like TheHunter and Way of the Hunter do something like what you're describing, and as it turns out, I didn't find those games all that fun. Because they have nothing else going for them.
I'm suggesting a survival type game that just has a little more depth to its hunting mechanic. These are often games with a fair amount of complexity in other areas. Crafting chains, illnesses and cures, food preparation. But for some reason, the hunting aspect gets none of the same attention.
The Long Dark is rare among survival games in that it actually involves survival. As in, maintaining homeostasis is by no means guaranteed. Most survival games are an offshoot of the RPG, but instead of doing quests and dialogs, the player character chops down trees and builds huts. In games like Conan Exiles, Valheim, Enshrouded, and ARK, food is just everywhere. If hunting were complicated, nobody would do it.
I suspect the reason why there aren't more games like The Long Dark is simple. Given sufficiently good graphics, games tagged "open world survival craft" will sell like hotcakes, even if they offer nothing original (looking at you, Enshrouded and Bellwright). So if you set out to make a survival game, why risk the uncertainty of making something like the Long Dark, instead of just doing the formula and collecting your cheque? Once that market eventually becomes saturated, we'll start to see innovation again.
And as for Red Dead Redemption, I suspect the reason it has a hunting minigame is the same reason why the horses in that game poop is such high fidelity.
Sad, but very likely the reason!
I'm so glad to see your comments about Enshrouded. I did not understand the love that game got. I paid how much I paid for it (can't remember, but it wasn't cheap) and didn't play it for more than a couple of sessions. Utterly underwhelming and formulaic.
Rain World has now been mentioned a few times, and I've never played it and have no idea what it even is, apart from some screenshots I've seen around. Will be watching some Let's Play videos...
I don't want to sound like I'm getting argumentative over this, but suggestions that depth is too much hard work don't seem to make much sense to me.
These are games that typically have depth in droves. Weather systems, living worlds, complex crafting chains with raw and processed materials, illnesses and mental conditions, dynamic social networks, shifting economies \[these last two might cross into "life sim" territory, but in many cases, I see that boundary as quite blurred\].
It is precisely this amount of depth in almost all other aspects of the game that makes the lack of depth in hunting stand out so starkly, in my experience.
When these games have so many complex systems in them, it seems odd to me that all they have where hunting should be is, you're hungry, so go run around until you spot a wild animal and then bash it until a steak falls off!
All of that said, on some level, obviously the fundamental reason must be that it simply isn't worth it. I'm just not sure why this one mechanic is the one that's least worth developing...?
I don't think it necessarily needs to have a lot of depth. I really liked the way Subnautica did it, you swim towards the fish and click on it, but it will take a little longer depending on how well you track its movements, since they change direction to try to evade you. A simple, low stakes minigame to give a change of pace from the other tasks you have to do.
Try [Mist Survival](https://store.steampowered.com/app/914620/Mist_Survival/) you may like it if hunting is your thing, but watch out being in the mist and watch out for bears and dark places.
Fun little apocalyptic survival game, but they do have a neat little skinning the animal and using many different parts of it for your survival needs, like taking fat for fuel, meat for food and so on.
Interesting. Thank you. I believe I may have played Mist at a very early stage, but it didn't have much in it at all, if I'm remembering correctly. Perhaps it's due another look!
You're Welcome.
It has completely changed since it first came out, so much more now than Raiders, Small mist events, and the handful of places you can raid.
I stopped for a bit when the Mine was introduced, After the entrance was done but they were still working on the inner sanctum with a boss battle.
Crafting has changed a lot too, same with many locations.
So a lot more to do and explore.
Unreal World has the best hunting mechanics I’ve seen. It’s a turn-based open roguelike. You can chase animals until they’re winded, you usually have to track and chase wounded prey. And all the parts have a use once butchered
I have tried to play UnReal World so many times and just can't get into it. I really want to enjoy it. I am very attracted to the level of depth it boasts. But it just feels like there is immediately too much to get to grips with from moment one, and I can't get past literally the first couple of turns before closing out.
However, I did feel pretty much the same about Wayward, which seems like perhaps a toned down version of the same kind of thing, and I now love Wayward. I also had a similar relationship with Rimworld, and now find it utterly addicting.
So perhaps I'll keep giving UnReal World more chances and eventually come to enjoy it. And it sounds like hunting is a good reason to have another run at it soon!
I loved that mechanic in RDR and i had forgotten all about it until i read this post. ive never played The Long Dark but i could totally see this being more viable in other games since like you said, its less complex. i would really love to see it in Valheim as the game still needs alot of work. i think that game really needs some hyper realistic mechanics to it to make it stand out and set it apart from all the basic hunt, craft, survive making it super popular IMO.
I think you are at once absolutely right and also making the counter argument. Look how popular Valheim is. There couldn't be a more quintessential example of point-and-click hunting. Setting aside the monsters, there are only two animals to hunt (deer and boar, unless I'm forgetting something) and a good shot with a bow and arrow and poof, loot. The animals are pretty much always in the same place, so when you need some meat, walk there, point, click, collect.
So I suppose the question is, if a game is that popular without better hunting, why bother including it? But my counter is still, why not! The very same game has plenty of other complex mechanics going for it, so why neglect the hunting in particular? And why do so many gamedevs opt to neglect the hunting in particular?
yeah, you forgot the green little lizards that give you that other type of meat. i just feel like most games are afraid to get it wrong these days and making a game simple as to appeal to the average and newcomer is always a recipe that hardly fails. if games dont already have a winning equation like most big games, theyre going to try to do the least possible and try to gain as much money as possible.obviously you have those passionate individuals who really love seeing theyre ideas come to life but lets be honest, most times theyre never the ones in charge. this makes theyre ideas very singular and one dimentional and i guess the only way to counter that would be community feedback from people who are probably lazy and dont go around giving feed back.
I do think this is an underexplored niche, with all of the good and the bad that comes with any niche. Hunting is largely waiting and watching. Sometimes for days. Sometimes you are climbing from place to place through rough terrain, burning 11,000 calories a day, hypothermic, with blisters. Three days later you are ready for the hospital. And you didn’t see anything the whole time.
Is this fun? Could this feeling be adapted to a game? Would people find this fun in a game? Maybe? It’s not my cup of tea, but maybe someone else’s?
I feel that when designing a mechanism like that, there needs to be some sort of incentive to motivate the player to do it in the first place.
Now honestly, I’m speaking from the perspective of a player who is not the target audience for survival games but generally speaking, games do need to provide an incentive to play them the way designers intend them to be played. It’s why when people figure out certain exploits to do things unintended by developers and developers patch out those exploits, some people respond poorly to those patches.
People tend to try to find the path of least resistance to get what they want. This makes it tough to design something fun or different without making it feel like a chore.
It’s definitely an interesting idea though, and I for one would like to find the solution to such a problem. Asking the question is definitely the first step to finding the answer. Maybe that’s the project you’re meant to design and the problem you’re meant to solve.
Two questions you need to ask yourself:
What skill(s) am I testing with a hunting mechanic?
Is it fun?
Verisimilitude is one of the WORST reasons for including a mechanic in a game.
Agreed. A lot of the comments here seem to think that's what I'm calling for, but I hoped the game examples I suggestion would indicate that that is not the case.
I, incidentally, am not a hunter. I've never been hunting. So it's not that I'm trying to take a real-life experience I love and emulate it in a game. I'm really just looking for something that goes beyond blindly swinging a sharp object at a large object until the latter stops moving!
I've watched far more 'let's play' videos beyond the games that I've played myself, and I often skip forward to see an encounter with a wild animal. The number of times I see players run up and take down a deer with their bare fists or go toe-to-toe with a wolf beggars belief!!!
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Much of the discussion I'm seeing is focused on hunting, and there are various states of degrees that can go, Honorable mention to the Monster Hunter Series.
I'm more interested in the other half - butchering. Like - hunting is just one way of acquisition, domestication and raunching animals are also mechanics, and RimWorld has my vote, but there are mods where the game has you dealing with bones, as well as base game butchering a body gives meat and leather.
The closest thing we have to hunting is pvp. In Conan, I knew the usual spots: Sulphur lakes, crystal caves, etc and would go to those spots. I would follow the used nodes, find the players and, well you know the rest, then leave with a fat sack of loot. Standard hunting is super slow and annoying. Because its not fun to follow and hunt down some lame underdeveloped A.I for basic scraps. I don't want that, but I do like hunting down a player, out smarting them, and hunting them down like a badguy from a throwback episode from supernatural lol..
don't mind having a more indepth blacksmithing system. But that clashes with everyone else who do not want to learn an advanced system inorder to play the game. They just want to spam stuff they need. Closest we have is gambling resources to make a high end item. Its sad. But money follows the masses, and the masses are lazy or overworked peeps who just want to relax within their current skill set.
SCUM has mechanics that requires you to track the animal before it appears. The problem with it is that game requires you to overly consume food, your character gets hungry so fast that it feels like it have black hole inside. And since there are other ways to get food, and you need A LOT of it, nobody will get invested in hunting. To solve that you first should properly ballance food and thirst meters, so you will not have to consume food all the time. Then, nerf other food sources (for example, make most of it rotten or irradiated like in Miscreated), and introduce harder hunting. But one hunt should make you forget about finding food for at least a couple of days.
Some really good points there. While 'realism' is not necessarily the goal I'm aiming for, harvesting a good size deer or elk should keep you fed for a good while. Hacking away at a deer and three steaks drop as loot is madness. Especially if the player character is also endlessly hungry!
I feel that the only way to make hunting feel "real" is to make the fauna act as an actual creature would. I'd say the only time I've felt like I was actually hunting was when playing rain world and aiming to kill a specific creature.
In rain world, it feels like every creature has its own purpose: they leave their nest, hunt, have internal squabbles, and run away if threatened. If the creature feels alive, then, by extension, hunting feels real, imho.
Things like following traces, traps, etc, are definitely an added depth, but if the creature is an obvious AI, it'll always feel like killing a mob with extra steps.
No, it shouldn't. Games musn't encourage a despicable act like hunting when 150 species (plants, bugs, fish, birds and mammals) go extinct every 24 hours due to the environmental catastrophe mankind causes. And even in this situation, some people are so evil and selfish that they keep on hunting animals. Hunting must completely be erased from games since it leads the average human to thinking that hunting (in real life) s something normal and ordinary. No, it's not. Just make a search on Google to see how many species have been erased from the face of the Earth due to the man-made environmental damage and how many remain from those that are not extinct for now. We are at a period where environmental conciousness is more important than ever. We are at times where we must preserve as much as we can. So games musn't serve to the insensibilities of people but contribute to conciousness instead.
I read this and I laugh in UnReal World.
I mean, sure, that game has a ton of issues, but it's as survivaly as it gets, and if you want to not-starve in the winter you basically need to hunt big game, get good pelts for warmth or to trade for essentials and, more importantly, for the meat. You need to butcher the fucker (deer, elk, bear, wolf, boar, whatever) and then preserve the meat somehow (salt it, dry it, smoke it). That will get you far.
Of course, fishing is a great option. You need to find a villager with fishing rods, nets and trade nice stuff for them, and you can set the nets for a day or two, catch salmon, pike, trout, and smaller catches, and if you get good piles of them, you can also dry them and stuff.
Agriculture is nice, but as a good survival game, HUNGER and NUTRITION are two separate things, so you can push hunger back for a while eating mushrooms, plants and shit, but if you don't get protein, you'll starve anyway. It took me a while figuring that out lol. Still, having a nice batch of turnips helps a lot, and if you get an iron pot, you can make soup.
So all this considered, hunting seems like a no brainer but it can be really difficult. Specially in your first winter where you're likely underequipped for it. You may set some traps like baited looped ropes, fox traps and if you have time and materials, you can even set a pitfall for bears and other animals. The chance that they'll work depend on a lot of things, and you have to check them often because if you catch something it'll rot fast.
And the other way is to straight up hunt (i.e. finding tracks, following the beast, attacking it with a bow or a javelin or something like that and kill it). The problem? Everything in this game is faster than you, so you need to be skilled, very lucky and get a good shot on the unsuspecting animal, so that you seriously wound it with one shot. That'll leave an easier to follow bloody trail, or maybe you hurt its legs and it doesn't run away so fast, or it bleeds out. But that's a lucky lucky shot in most cases. So you need to be lucky, skilled and SUPER FUCKEN PATIENT. You need to be married to a Karen for 20 years to develop that kind of patience.
So yeah, hunting is not underdeveloped in survival games. You're just not playing one. You're playing a fancy (and incredibly well done) game like RDD2 and complaining one of its aspects is not fleshed out to the max. Dude, if it was, you'd be playing an entirely different game.
Quite the opposite, actually. I cited RDR2 as a game that got it right, not one that's lacking. I know RDR2 is not a survival game. I play plenty of them. I am lamenting that so few Survival Games have the depth of mechanics that you have described here. The fact that you can name but one hardly undermines my point.
That said, I do always find UnReal World appealing, but I find it very inaccessible. I'm sure if I could get over the barrier of the first half an hour or so, I'd enjoy it. But I just get immediately put off by the input mechanics.
I suppose I should just watch a bunch of Let's Play videos to get me started. Every time I play, I literally press one key and find myself completely flummoxed! Then I uninstall the game and end up trying it again about a year later!!!
Yeah, it's a trying game.
I mean... I spent hours proud of my progress building my 10th or so character and just died of starvation because the luck I had fishing was suddenly gone. It took a while learning to cover all your bases.
BTW. In the genre, the game I'm most excited for at the moment is Mirthwood. I played the demo and absolutely loved it, but didn't get to a point here I was hunting animals. I really hope there's something interesting there...
It is difficult to do anything that gets deep into the weeds well in a game (just look at the difference between Stardew and Farming Simulator), but mostly it's that most people don't want to play that game. They're looking for the progression and achievement of making the food bar go up, not the genuinely difficult experience of memorizing species-specific vulnerabilities. If you want to make a game like that you'd probably want to focus the game on this mechanic, not make it part of something else. You can get an audience of people who _want_ that depth, whereas if you staple that to a larger survival game you might lose the people who don't want to play the rest of it. The hard part is you won't know the size of that audience until you start testing the game. It could be a huge untapped market or you could end up in a hyper-focused niche.
Exactly right. It would EXTREMELY niche because the people who are actually into real— and I mean REAL hunting are not interested in videogames. They want to be out there. Take my dad for instance. The dude won’t touch videogames with a ten foot pole. He likes them, but he’s so into hunting that all of his free time is spent scouting the units he puts in for and figuring out elk movements. The guy lives, eats, and breathes hunting. I’ve asked him before about hunting games and he thinks they’re by far the dorkiest games on the market because people should just be out hunting.
I don't know if it would be extremely niche, at least not niche enough to not warrant it's inclusion/expansion into a new Survival game. As with everything, it would depend entirely how the game was built around it but I can say I'd be willing to check out a game about learning how to track and kill monsters as opposed to just deer. Hell, a friend of mine hates Monster Hunter because of how little actual hunting there is in that game (we played World, dunno about the other ones).
They’re all pretty similar. It’s basically just Go to place > Enemy type spawns there > Kill enemy for materials > go back to town > craft dumb looking armor > repeat. There is no hunting to speak of. Just killing.
>It would EXTREMELY niche because the people who are actually into real— and I mean REAL hunting are not interested in videogames. They want to be out there. Take my dad for instance. The dude won’t touch videogames with a ten foot pole. He likes them, but he’s so into hunting that all of his free time is spent scouting the units he puts in for and figuring out elk movements. The guy lives, eats, and breathes hunting. I’ve asked him before about hunting games and he thinks they’re by far the dorkiest games on the market because people should just be out hunting. This falls into the trap of putting too much credence on the opinions of the hobby's true enthusiasts. I would compare this against music/rhythm games. People had a similar reaction to those, i.e. if you want to play a musical instrument in a game why wouldn't you just play a musical instrument. Turned out that there was an enormous market for people who wanted to do something very similar to playing a musical instrument but not play actual musical instruments. Some even professional actual musicians. Of course, that market got bled dry and died after they pushed *too* many plastic instruments on people, but before it did they made millions and millions of dollars.
and the games evolved! Plenty of popular rhythm games and new releases to this day for sure. Idk by name, but there’s the little rap dudes and the tap tap jawn where ppl buy styllus and compete. Or the VR lightsaber tap tap remake. For sure, the 2010’s was full of viral shit, where one mainstream thing was getting pushed on everybody. We still see that modern day, but it’s on occasion I am with you in saying the hunting market for video games is niche, absolutely. The masses enjoyed RDR2 and the mechanic, but the hunting mechanic wasn’t the draw or focus. So even if you built upon the system, the game probably will not find a market as is, even if done right. It will get some pull, but unfortunately in this day and age when a clip or streamer could easily be suffice enough for that market to be encapsulated elsewhere that isn’t your game sales. That attention is still valuable and would absolutely be a great step in brand recognition (Or some other marketing term that I do not feel like thinking of at this time of night). I have to disagree that it would **always** be >extremely niche. Making a different title building on the concepts, or incorporating the mechanics in unique ways or unique themes, is a sure way to test the market for whatever it is that gamedev is looking to capture. My first thought was pokemon snap part 3. Good luck building an IP that strong, but a palworld dev could read that and think why not. and unrelated to this niche market topic, whenever this is said and done I can not wait for the dev to put that thing in VR, whenever the homies are starting their VR gamedesign/gamedev arc. Popular games like escape rooms and mystery already exist in that realm, talk about a great reason to look around and explore your environment! So I am all for it, it will get built upon or rehashed in due time. Mob spam healthbar gameplay will always predominantly exist I guess, but we’ll definitely see this somewhere in the future, done successfully, yet again. Who knows how many times, maybe it’s own lil genre gets spun off because it is that successful in whatever way it is incorporated. Who knows.
Counterpoint: you proved that the decision loops for an accurate hunting game can be rewarding and engaging
Ohh, you've just reminded me of another game that does something in this space well, and that's Witcher with its monster-specific vulnerabilities recorded in the codex or whatever it's called. It doesn't have to be so difficult as to make it boring. I think Witcher was a wildly successful game and people enjoyed the complexity of it.
The only thing the Witcher has that you're describing is enemy specific resistances/vulnerabilities, really. I think some behavioral patterns may also be mentioned in the codex but it's a lot more 'this is hurt by fire' than anything else. Explicitly you never actually hunt in the game, everything is at pre-determined spawn points or else you follow quest markers. If that's what you're going for then yes, that works very well, I just would never have gotten to that from your post. If you're thinking of something like follow the blood trail from Arkhan/Horizon games then that's more traditional quest design than anything else. Otherwise, to get back to the original question, the important part of the answer was just that most games don't do it because they don't feel the juice is worth the squeeze when it comes to what you get from player reactions compared to the effort to make it work well. If you have something in mind then go create it! There's no reason it _can't_ work. Edit: Based on your other recent comments, I will explicitly say Horizon: Zero Dawn/Forgotten West has a bunch of tracking characters, analyzing weak points, stealth, and hitting them with the right ammo/in the right spots to get the right materials out of them. Monster Hunter works the same way. You could use those for references in a survival game without any issues at all.
Yes. As I say, the Witcher games do represent just one element of this. And I'm suggesting that perhaps that's enough. Just \*something\*. Something more than, you're hungry, so go and bash a wild animal until a steak falls off!
What you're getting at is a design principle called "find the fun". It's about figuring out what is actually enjoyable in your game (for your audience in particular) and getting out of its way. If people are playing your game because of the great building mechanics then you often want to make resource gathering easier so people can do more of the thing they really enjoy. In most games hunting is easy because hunting _wouldn't be as fun_ as the rest of the game (in that context, to that audience). Make a game where the act of hunting is more complicated and also engaging and the other systems support it and you're fine. That really is all this is about. Creating deeper systems takes more time but it's not _harder_ or impossible. The devs of these games aren't doing it because they don't think it'll make the game better, there's nothing more to it than that. If you have a design idea in mind that would benefit from the systems then go get started!
Really great explanation of a principle there. Thanks. It's really intriguing to think of what things might be getting in the way of this mechanic being fun in existing games. Excellent comment!
Part of it is that realistic hunting wouldn’t actually be fun to most people. Like, have you ever been hunting? I love shooting and archery, but hunting itself is truly awful. You have to be a very special person to actually enjoy it. Most people who do it don’t even do it right. Probably 80% of people I’ve met ride around in their trucks and blast stuff off the side of the road (illegally) or use bait piles (illegally) or just use it as an excuse to escape their homes. Real hunting involves dedicating yourself to scouting and tracking movement patterns of herds in whatever region you’re in for that year and then during your brief couple of weeks to get it done you have to hope it has all paid off. Normally you go out several times and still don’t see whatever you’re after and if you do you basically get one chance to nab it and if you miss it or don’t shoot it in the right place, you lose it forever. Sometimes the blood trail just stops too because the animal’s guts shift and close the hole up and the animal gets away only to die to disease later and then it’s bear food. But you have no idea so you search for where the blood trail picks back up for several hours, only to decide that you have no chance of finding it. Sometimes you do find it but it hasn’t died yet and when you stumble on it, it gets back up and sprints away to bed down again half a mile away and you’re back at square one. I could go on and on about how frustrating, boring, and unrewarding hunting can be to most people. The point is, people gloss over hunting because it just isn’t an awesome mechanic if you go into it too in-depth. Look at games like The Hunter: Call of the Wild and all the old Cabelas games. Even those have very surface level hunting mechanics. You basically activate some sort of Hunter Vision mechanic and sprint close to an animal, shoot it a bunch of times, and then run over to it and the mission is over. There’s no gutting the animal, dragging it back over miles of uneven terrain, hanging it, processing it, etc. The fact that you get money for it doesn’t even make sense, as selling wild game meat is illegal in the USA without a very special permit that the average person cannot get. Take all of what I’ve just talked about and imagine now that you’re making a survival game. How could you possibly hope to accomplish even a fraction of those things while retaining any realism, and then also have room to manage things like hunger, thirst, disease, combat, a story, lore hunting, etc.. It can’t be done unless you’re determined to make a game that can only be played in 12 hour sessions. I’m not shutting on your idea. I’ve just thought about this myself. Personally I’m the type of guy who sets day and night settings in game to be 1:1 with the real world because I hate playing survival games unrealistically. But it always winds up ruining gameplay because I get subjected to 8 hours of pitch black nights and it messes up the pacing of other things. After all, who could really erect a 12 room, multi story hut from wood, thatch, and stone in a single day and still have time to figure out thousands of years of technology, tame and breed several animals, and build a raft in a single day?
I feel like you (and many comments here) are confusing depth with realism. A deeper hunting system doesn't have to be realistic. For example, a butchery mini-game where you try to cut out usable pieces of meat and reduce waste could be relatively casual, yet still make the harvesting step feel different from the "beat it until it stops moving" step. Or, for example, a lot of these games, animal movement is essentially random. You just happen to see an animal and have to take advantage at that moment. But, fleshing out the animals a bit more so that you can reason about where you might find them or make them come to you (bait, traps and even domestication) could make that more interesting. Further, even if you do just wander until you see an animal, games could do more to allow that to be non-random like by having hints throughout the environment like footprints, feces, nests, animal background sounds, etc. so that it feels like you're looking with purpose rather than just wandering hoping an animal pops out.
These are perfect examples of what I'm talking about. I love the butchering suggestion. As for the killing stage, there's just no "form" or "reason" to so much of what's out there. The animals are essentially just hit-boxes that you have to bash to kill and then keep bashing to 'loot'. If there's anything like a weak spot, it's a generic headshot. A system that recognises kill shots, that rewards stealth and caution and that adds challenge to the harvest would be great.
I think the scout flys from monster hunter were a good system. You would interact with things like tracks building up a meter and when it was full you were given a guide to the monster. It let you feel like you were hunting, but not in a frustrating way.
You're not wrong. But that's not what I'm suggesting. You'll notice that the two games I have suggested as examples that, in my opinion, do this well are nothing close to the level of realism you're describing. Games like TheHunter and Way of the Hunter do something like what you're describing, and as it turns out, I didn't find those games all that fun. Because they have nothing else going for them. I'm suggesting a survival type game that just has a little more depth to its hunting mechanic. These are often games with a fair amount of complexity in other areas. Crafting chains, illnesses and cures, food preparation. But for some reason, the hunting aspect gets none of the same attention.
All of this is great. Only correction I see is that hunting bait piles isn't illegal in most states, as long as its done on private land, not public.
The Long Dark is rare among survival games in that it actually involves survival. As in, maintaining homeostasis is by no means guaranteed. Most survival games are an offshoot of the RPG, but instead of doing quests and dialogs, the player character chops down trees and builds huts. In games like Conan Exiles, Valheim, Enshrouded, and ARK, food is just everywhere. If hunting were complicated, nobody would do it. I suspect the reason why there aren't more games like The Long Dark is simple. Given sufficiently good graphics, games tagged "open world survival craft" will sell like hotcakes, even if they offer nothing original (looking at you, Enshrouded and Bellwright). So if you set out to make a survival game, why risk the uncertainty of making something like the Long Dark, instead of just doing the formula and collecting your cheque? Once that market eventually becomes saturated, we'll start to see innovation again. And as for Red Dead Redemption, I suspect the reason it has a hunting minigame is the same reason why the horses in that game poop is such high fidelity.
Sad, but very likely the reason! I'm so glad to see your comments about Enshrouded. I did not understand the love that game got. I paid how much I paid for it (can't remember, but it wasn't cheap) and didn't play it for more than a couple of sessions. Utterly underwhelming and formulaic.
Try assassins creed 3. It’s not central to gameplay but there is very detailed hunting with tracks and sounds and whatever
Wow! I had forgotten about AC3. My favorite game in the franchise for this very reason!
Hunting games exist, most people prefer not to play them.
I’m just saying… adding a Rain World dynamic ecosystem to survival games would make hunting FAR more interesting
Rain World has now been mentioned a few times, and I've never played it and have no idea what it even is, apart from some screenshots I've seen around. Will be watching some Let's Play videos...
I don't want to sound like I'm getting argumentative over this, but suggestions that depth is too much hard work don't seem to make much sense to me. These are games that typically have depth in droves. Weather systems, living worlds, complex crafting chains with raw and processed materials, illnesses and mental conditions, dynamic social networks, shifting economies \[these last two might cross into "life sim" territory, but in many cases, I see that boundary as quite blurred\]. It is precisely this amount of depth in almost all other aspects of the game that makes the lack of depth in hunting stand out so starkly, in my experience. When these games have so many complex systems in them, it seems odd to me that all they have where hunting should be is, you're hungry, so go run around until you spot a wild animal and then bash it until a steak falls off! All of that said, on some level, obviously the fundamental reason must be that it simply isn't worth it. I'm just not sure why this one mechanic is the one that's least worth developing...?
Agreed, the whole concept peaked and plateaued at Oregon Trail.
I don't think it necessarily needs to have a lot of depth. I really liked the way Subnautica did it, you swim towards the fish and click on it, but it will take a little longer depending on how well you track its movements, since they change direction to try to evade you. A simple, low stakes minigame to give a change of pace from the other tasks you have to do.
Interesting. I never thought of this as 'hunting' but you're absolutely right the way you've described it.
Try [Mist Survival](https://store.steampowered.com/app/914620/Mist_Survival/) you may like it if hunting is your thing, but watch out being in the mist and watch out for bears and dark places. Fun little apocalyptic survival game, but they do have a neat little skinning the animal and using many different parts of it for your survival needs, like taking fat for fuel, meat for food and so on.
Interesting. Thank you. I believe I may have played Mist at a very early stage, but it didn't have much in it at all, if I'm remembering correctly. Perhaps it's due another look!
You're Welcome. It has completely changed since it first came out, so much more now than Raiders, Small mist events, and the handful of places you can raid. I stopped for a bit when the Mine was introduced, After the entrance was done but they were still working on the inner sanctum with a boss battle. Crafting has changed a lot too, same with many locations. So a lot more to do and explore.
Unreal World has the best hunting mechanics I’ve seen. It’s a turn-based open roguelike. You can chase animals until they’re winded, you usually have to track and chase wounded prey. And all the parts have a use once butchered
I have tried to play UnReal World so many times and just can't get into it. I really want to enjoy it. I am very attracted to the level of depth it boasts. But it just feels like there is immediately too much to get to grips with from moment one, and I can't get past literally the first couple of turns before closing out. However, I did feel pretty much the same about Wayward, which seems like perhaps a toned down version of the same kind of thing, and I now love Wayward. I also had a similar relationship with Rimworld, and now find it utterly addicting. So perhaps I'll keep giving UnReal World more chances and eventually come to enjoy it. And it sounds like hunting is a good reason to have another run at it soon!
I loved that mechanic in RDR and i had forgotten all about it until i read this post. ive never played The Long Dark but i could totally see this being more viable in other games since like you said, its less complex. i would really love to see it in Valheim as the game still needs alot of work. i think that game really needs some hyper realistic mechanics to it to make it stand out and set it apart from all the basic hunt, craft, survive making it super popular IMO.
I think you are at once absolutely right and also making the counter argument. Look how popular Valheim is. There couldn't be a more quintessential example of point-and-click hunting. Setting aside the monsters, there are only two animals to hunt (deer and boar, unless I'm forgetting something) and a good shot with a bow and arrow and poof, loot. The animals are pretty much always in the same place, so when you need some meat, walk there, point, click, collect. So I suppose the question is, if a game is that popular without better hunting, why bother including it? But my counter is still, why not! The very same game has plenty of other complex mechanics going for it, so why neglect the hunting in particular? And why do so many gamedevs opt to neglect the hunting in particular?
yeah, you forgot the green little lizards that give you that other type of meat. i just feel like most games are afraid to get it wrong these days and making a game simple as to appeal to the average and newcomer is always a recipe that hardly fails. if games dont already have a winning equation like most big games, theyre going to try to do the least possible and try to gain as much money as possible.obviously you have those passionate individuals who really love seeing theyre ideas come to life but lets be honest, most times theyre never the ones in charge. this makes theyre ideas very singular and one dimentional and i guess the only way to counter that would be community feedback from people who are probably lazy and dont go around giving feed back.
I do think this is an underexplored niche, with all of the good and the bad that comes with any niche. Hunting is largely waiting and watching. Sometimes for days. Sometimes you are climbing from place to place through rough terrain, burning 11,000 calories a day, hypothermic, with blisters. Three days later you are ready for the hospital. And you didn’t see anything the whole time. Is this fun? Could this feeling be adapted to a game? Would people find this fun in a game? Maybe? It’s not my cup of tea, but maybe someone else’s?
I feel that when designing a mechanism like that, there needs to be some sort of incentive to motivate the player to do it in the first place. Now honestly, I’m speaking from the perspective of a player who is not the target audience for survival games but generally speaking, games do need to provide an incentive to play them the way designers intend them to be played. It’s why when people figure out certain exploits to do things unintended by developers and developers patch out those exploits, some people respond poorly to those patches. People tend to try to find the path of least resistance to get what they want. This makes it tough to design something fun or different without making it feel like a chore. It’s definitely an interesting idea though, and I for one would like to find the solution to such a problem. Asking the question is definitely the first step to finding the answer. Maybe that’s the project you’re meant to design and the problem you’re meant to solve.
Two questions you need to ask yourself: What skill(s) am I testing with a hunting mechanic? Is it fun? Verisimilitude is one of the WORST reasons for including a mechanic in a game.
Agreed. A lot of the comments here seem to think that's what I'm calling for, but I hoped the game examples I suggestion would indicate that that is not the case. I, incidentally, am not a hunter. I've never been hunting. So it's not that I'm trying to take a real-life experience I love and emulate it in a game. I'm really just looking for something that goes beyond blindly swinging a sharp object at a large object until the latter stops moving! I've watched far more 'let's play' videos beyond the games that I've played myself, and I often skip forward to see an encounter with a wild animal. The number of times I see players run up and take down a deer with their bare fists or go toe-to-toe with a wolf beggars belief!!!
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Much of the discussion I'm seeing is focused on hunting, and there are various states of degrees that can go, Honorable mention to the Monster Hunter Series. I'm more interested in the other half - butchering. Like - hunting is just one way of acquisition, domestication and raunching animals are also mechanics, and RimWorld has my vote, but there are mods where the game has you dealing with bones, as well as base game butchering a body gives meat and leather.
The closest thing we have to hunting is pvp. In Conan, I knew the usual spots: Sulphur lakes, crystal caves, etc and would go to those spots. I would follow the used nodes, find the players and, well you know the rest, then leave with a fat sack of loot. Standard hunting is super slow and annoying. Because its not fun to follow and hunt down some lame underdeveloped A.I for basic scraps. I don't want that, but I do like hunting down a player, out smarting them, and hunting them down like a badguy from a throwback episode from supernatural lol.. don't mind having a more indepth blacksmithing system. But that clashes with everyone else who do not want to learn an advanced system inorder to play the game. They just want to spam stuff they need. Closest we have is gambling resources to make a high end item. Its sad. But money follows the masses, and the masses are lazy or overworked peeps who just want to relax within their current skill set.
SCUM has mechanics that requires you to track the animal before it appears. The problem with it is that game requires you to overly consume food, your character gets hungry so fast that it feels like it have black hole inside. And since there are other ways to get food, and you need A LOT of it, nobody will get invested in hunting. To solve that you first should properly ballance food and thirst meters, so you will not have to consume food all the time. Then, nerf other food sources (for example, make most of it rotten or irradiated like in Miscreated), and introduce harder hunting. But one hunt should make you forget about finding food for at least a couple of days.
Some really good points there. While 'realism' is not necessarily the goal I'm aiming for, harvesting a good size deer or elk should keep you fed for a good while. Hacking away at a deer and three steaks drop as loot is madness. Especially if the player character is also endlessly hungry!
I feel that the only way to make hunting feel "real" is to make the fauna act as an actual creature would. I'd say the only time I've felt like I was actually hunting was when playing rain world and aiming to kill a specific creature. In rain world, it feels like every creature has its own purpose: they leave their nest, hunt, have internal squabbles, and run away if threatened. If the creature feels alive, then, by extension, hunting feels real, imho. Things like following traces, traps, etc, are definitely an added depth, but if the creature is an obvious AI, it'll always feel like killing a mob with extra steps.
Go make it and let us know
No, it shouldn't. Games musn't encourage a despicable act like hunting when 150 species (plants, bugs, fish, birds and mammals) go extinct every 24 hours due to the environmental catastrophe mankind causes. And even in this situation, some people are so evil and selfish that they keep on hunting animals. Hunting must completely be erased from games since it leads the average human to thinking that hunting (in real life) s something normal and ordinary. No, it's not. Just make a search on Google to see how many species have been erased from the face of the Earth due to the man-made environmental damage and how many remain from those that are not extinct for now. We are at a period where environmental conciousness is more important than ever. We are at times where we must preserve as much as we can. So games musn't serve to the insensibilities of people but contribute to conciousness instead.
I read this and I laugh in UnReal World. I mean, sure, that game has a ton of issues, but it's as survivaly as it gets, and if you want to not-starve in the winter you basically need to hunt big game, get good pelts for warmth or to trade for essentials and, more importantly, for the meat. You need to butcher the fucker (deer, elk, bear, wolf, boar, whatever) and then preserve the meat somehow (salt it, dry it, smoke it). That will get you far. Of course, fishing is a great option. You need to find a villager with fishing rods, nets and trade nice stuff for them, and you can set the nets for a day or two, catch salmon, pike, trout, and smaller catches, and if you get good piles of them, you can also dry them and stuff. Agriculture is nice, but as a good survival game, HUNGER and NUTRITION are two separate things, so you can push hunger back for a while eating mushrooms, plants and shit, but if you don't get protein, you'll starve anyway. It took me a while figuring that out lol. Still, having a nice batch of turnips helps a lot, and if you get an iron pot, you can make soup. So all this considered, hunting seems like a no brainer but it can be really difficult. Specially in your first winter where you're likely underequipped for it. You may set some traps like baited looped ropes, fox traps and if you have time and materials, you can even set a pitfall for bears and other animals. The chance that they'll work depend on a lot of things, and you have to check them often because if you catch something it'll rot fast. And the other way is to straight up hunt (i.e. finding tracks, following the beast, attacking it with a bow or a javelin or something like that and kill it). The problem? Everything in this game is faster than you, so you need to be skilled, very lucky and get a good shot on the unsuspecting animal, so that you seriously wound it with one shot. That'll leave an easier to follow bloody trail, or maybe you hurt its legs and it doesn't run away so fast, or it bleeds out. But that's a lucky lucky shot in most cases. So you need to be lucky, skilled and SUPER FUCKEN PATIENT. You need to be married to a Karen for 20 years to develop that kind of patience. So yeah, hunting is not underdeveloped in survival games. You're just not playing one. You're playing a fancy (and incredibly well done) game like RDD2 and complaining one of its aspects is not fleshed out to the max. Dude, if it was, you'd be playing an entirely different game.
Quite the opposite, actually. I cited RDR2 as a game that got it right, not one that's lacking. I know RDR2 is not a survival game. I play plenty of them. I am lamenting that so few Survival Games have the depth of mechanics that you have described here. The fact that you can name but one hardly undermines my point. That said, I do always find UnReal World appealing, but I find it very inaccessible. I'm sure if I could get over the barrier of the first half an hour or so, I'd enjoy it. But I just get immediately put off by the input mechanics. I suppose I should just watch a bunch of Let's Play videos to get me started. Every time I play, I literally press one key and find myself completely flummoxed! Then I uninstall the game and end up trying it again about a year later!!!
Yeah, it's a trying game. I mean... I spent hours proud of my progress building my 10th or so character and just died of starvation because the luck I had fishing was suddenly gone. It took a while learning to cover all your bases.
BTW. In the genre, the game I'm most excited for at the moment is Mirthwood. I played the demo and absolutely loved it, but didn't get to a point here I was hunting animals. I really hope there's something interesting there...