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Sunday, May 03, 2026
Longevity of survival crafting games
45 hours into Windrose, my enjoyment of the game has decreased significantly. Part of that is due to me having killed the second boss and reaching the third and currently last zone, the Cursed Swamp. The Cursed Swamp has far more and more aggressive enemies as the previous zones, as well as added difficulties like some sort of poison cloud over large parts. That is a bit problematic, because at the end of the second zone you are soft-locked with your gear upgrades to level 10, until you have collected enough resources from the third zone to upgrade them to level 15. If there are mobs everywhere, it is hard to gather those resources, without being attacked by level 15 mobs.
Of course, Windrose is still in the first phase of early access, and I assume that more additional biomes will be added, and maybe the leveling curve smoothed a bit. Enshrouded, which is a good bit further on in the development cycle, occupied me for nearly 90 hours before I got bored. But I find I get bored after X hours with every survival crafting game, and there is very little motivation to either continue or replay them from the start.
I believe that this is due to how much you depend in these games on the tech tree, or what you could call resource evolution. These games are often divided into different biomes, and to develop your character further you need to get to the next biome with the next set of resources and unlock the next set of crafted items. The link between what your character does and can do with the tech tree is far more direct than in other genres of games where you might have a tech tree or talent tree, but do a lot of things independently from that.
I sometimes even feel in other genres, e.g. grand strategy games like EU5, the fact that the tech tree is always the same or nearly the same lowers my motivation to replay the game. In survival crafting games the closer connection to the tech tree means that due to the tech tree being exactly the same, a second game would play out almost identically to a first game. So why bother? It isn't as if I could go down a different route and do things very differently when playing the game again.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link
