Last week, amid the Microsoft buyout and unionization/unionbusting within Activision, Blizzard boldly, absurdly stepped forward and announced that it was hiring for a survival game in a new IP, thereby announcing that it’s making a survival game in a new IP. And the collective response was mostly… bewilderment?
I know a lot of folks think survival games are passé. I would definitely agree that we’ve seen the “fast-fashion” bubble of garbage survival games come and go, and MMORPG players especially have moved on, being as we are pretty tired of watching studios suck the souls out of MMOs and repackage them in survivalbox clones.
But I also think the intense popularity of Valheim and the massive interest in New World’s launch show that there’s still a huge market for these types of games – if they’re done extremely well. Blizzard was once capable of taking the husks of old genres and reimagining them with polish. Can it do so again? I don’t know. Do we even want to play anything from Blizzard anyway? I don’t know that either. There’s a lot of ifs and maybes on the road between here and there for me.
How about you: Do you even want a survival game from Blizzard?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
