Survival sandboxes are not MMORPGs, but they are online games, and so they occupy an odd middle space insofar as many of them feature MMORPG-like gameplay loops. V Rising comes to mind as the obvious game that’s in the news right now since it finally launched, but we’ve had a lot of these games in early access and also not in early access that have been bouncing around for a while now.
The bright side is that often these games can give you a sort of abridged form of MMO progression: You get the process of building yourself up, gathering resources, and so forth lasting just long enough to be satisfying. But there’s also a lack of permanence on top of that, and when you consider how many of these styles of games are early access titles that subsequently never make it to actual access they become a bit dicey. So has a survival sandbox ever really grabbed your attention?