Multiplayer survival is one of the most-played yet underrated genres out there. In a nutshell, these kinds of games put you on a server with a few others where you’ll try to survive in a rather dangerous world. However, apart from fighting the environments, you’ll also have to deal with threats in the form of other players, depending on the game you’re playing. Today, these games are experiencing a major resurgence, with one title getting an enormous amount of exposure from a group of popular streamers.

With that said, though they’re not the most refined of multiplayer games, they’re highly enjoyable regardless if you’re playing co-op or PvP. If you ask us, their rise is a good thing, and there’s a lot we can look forward to. delightful

Survival co-op: a merciless, yet rewarding genre

Multiplayer survival games include popular titles like:

- Rust
- Conan Exiles
- Raft
- The Forest
- DayZ
- Ark
- Grounded

Players usually start with nothing, and they’ll have to scavenge materials to build themselves a home. Apart from this, there’s also their characters’ physiological needs: food, water, and protection from the elements. These titles usually have a long learning curve, taking dozens of hours to fully know the basics and hundreds to master its mechanics fully. Yes, they’re not exactly noob-friendly, but the difficulty is offset by the experience they provide.

Once you’ve gotten the hang of these games, you can end up creating massive structures/fortresses and go to war with other factions within the server. The PvP aspect is brutal as it is rewarding: bases will get wiped and 30 hours of grinding can be lost within a couple of hours.

Community sandboxes

However, aren’t just strictly PvP: they’re also PvE, and people can get into roleplaying servers if they’re into this playstyle. Moreover, server owners and their community can create immersive sandboxes with a thriving community complete with societal structures. For example, games like Conan Exiles have servers wherein the map is divided into kingdoms with their own culture and even a class system.

Overall, anything goes: these games can be the typical PvP or PvE experience, or one where it is what the community imagines it to be.

OTV and Rust

Today, Rust is the most popular multiplayer survival title today and it recently reached its all-time high in terms of concurrent players at 244,000. This leap in numbers was undoubtedly brought about by a collection of streamers belonging to OfflineTV (OTV), whose members include streamers like Pokimane and Disguised Toast. They created a server and invited over their friends like Sykkuno, Corpse Husband, Valkyrae, and Ash_on_lol. Thrown into the mix are established streamers like Shroud, Myth, and xQc.

The influence these streamers hold on their audiences is astonishing, and it’s also important to note this isn’t the first game they helped popularise given they helped in bringing Among Us to the top of the charts. To a limited extent, they’re also playing other survival games like Raft and Project Winter.

A bright future ahead: more adventures incoming

You could safely say that the survival coop titles we’ve received in the past few years had numerous technical limitations. Many were the first titles in the franchise and some were created by indie studios on a tiny budget. In addition, many had issues like bugs and glitches, and they didn’t exactly provide a stellar experience at launch. Although they’ve improved since then, this is a thing we can’t overlook.

With that said, there are more upcoming survival games, notably sequels, in the next couple of years (maybe even in 2021 barring delays). The most notable of which is Ark 2, debuting a trailer in The Game Awards starring Vin Diesel who is also an executive producer, and Sons of the Forest, a sequel to The Forest.

We also hope there will be more multiplayer survival games in the future, seeing as there are other unexplored themes and settings. For example, there’s still barely any decent zombie-survival title or a medieval or historical-themed survival title. Currently, there aren’t a lot of games in this genre in development, but with the sudden success of Rust, we could see more in a couple of years.

Bringing people together in these trying times