Why do all crafting/survival games end up focus on designing homes? (QQ)

[Zahiriously]

Everytime there is a decent crafting/survival game it seems to change focus to making many and/or big patches with focus on building blocks and options.
I do not mind they provide this, but clearly it seems to take precedence over any other wanted crafting or survival content.
Why? I don't know for sure, but I have a feeling:
Majority of the population are hooked on home making and turn over from reality TV. Why not? Every TV station has something they send every day.
Perhaps this is brought in to the game world, and the game developers have to follow up on this to be able to get market shares of this community to provide needed income and to survive in the gaming industry.
Conclusion: Players who want the actual content of crafting and survival end up with another home making game 😂😭

I moved on to Icarus Survival, but also here there is already in discussion or Discord the active "players" are already screaming for building block to build their homes and make it nice with many details... I assume Icarus Survival will also be forced to go this direction as it is nice to post beautiful architecture of creative home designs in the wild rather than a player killed a boss.

---

Perhaps we could get the "best" of both worlds with both designs and actual game content. However, money talks.

It is a reason there exist a saying of "games were better before". This is the reason. At least one of them.

[stvlepore]

I like the building aspects of some games. Even FO4's settlement building. Its a game within the game. With Valheim I can play the exploring/crafting/leveling to the next boss game and when the mood strikes, take a break from that to work on my base. Its something else to do within the game. I think most successful games have something like this.

[Husker_85]

If you're not trying to escape from reality with home makeover games then you're probably one of the people who got the world this messed up in the first place.

So.. OK BOOMER.

[blankitosonic]

Well , there you got "the long dark "thats focus in hard survival in the hard winter without building system just craft
And maybe green hell , yes you can build a "mud" house but its a "HELL" to finish because their building physics and requeriments are trash but their survival aspect its godlike hard
Valheim its a light survival , that focus in exploration and building

[redgreen999]

Cause we need all the creature comforts. I don't want to live in the rain with a leaking roof.

[Calydor]

Let's see, do I want to escape the failures of my life in the real world by getting roflstomped by mosquitos and green body builders, or do I want to build a perfect house I never have to clean? Hmmmm, decisions, decisions ...

[Alethra]

Lol. Nobody is forcing you to build houses constantly. You can kill monsters to your heart's desire. You should try Terraria. That's an AWESOME game. The looks are old school but it's one of the best games out there and it's cheap! Definite value for your money. Anyway ...Valheim is not finished yet. So instead of whining about other people's likes/dislikes, why don't you just put a constructive critcism in the suggestions thread and either play the game or find another game you want to play. OH! Have you tried The Forest? That's a decent game, too. The premise is you crash in a plane with your son on an island and your son is missing. There are cannibals on the island. You are trying to find him, and puzzle out the what happened to him.

[Zahiriously]

I am a bit sad that big updates and patches are "forced" to make more content on house building than the actual gameplay. These big updates/patches with focus on home design should rather be supplement to the actual game and not become the game.

To underline my point I do not mind getting content on homebuilding. I can enjoy building from time to time. However. I was expecting Mistlands to be complete before getting more food and home building designs. Alas, this is the direction sandbox games are going.

[Gladi8er65]

Originally posted by Zahiriously:

I am a bit sad that big updates and patches are "forced" to make more content on house building than the actual gameplay. These big updates/patches with focus on home design should rather be supplement to the actual game and not become the game.

To underline my point I do not mind getting content on homebuilding. I can enjoy building from time to time. However. I was expecting Mistlands to be complete before getting more food and home building designs. Alas, this is the direction sandbox games are going.

They did ONE home patch... so what? the rest is going to be new biome(s) and the content to populate them...

The "survival" content in this game hinges directly on what foods are prepared and eaten, as well as creating tonics (mead) of various types for various effects. This home update dealt with adding various new foods as well as restructuring the eating system, and "home" part of it kinda fit within the same lane.

A player certainly isn't required to build a huge sprawling base, BUT at the same time there are a lot of crafting stations required to make your gear (all gear is crafted and upgraded by the player), and you need somewhere safe to set up those crafting stations.

I personally love building nice looking houses etc., but when it comes to being serious about playing the game, I simply dig out underneath a certain Boss altar, just to have a safe place to set up all my crafting needs and don't bother with fancy houses... I go strictly for function.

[Wiergate]

H&H is just to tide us over, I don't mind having a few build pieces and recipes to mess around with if it buys IG time to do Mistlands properly with less fear of losing hype momentum.

I wouldn't worry and I don't buy into the home making/reality show addiction theory for a second.
The game has a serious focus on base and home building to begin with seeing that vital crafting stations require components that can't be teleported and most recipes require agriculture. Foods, gear upgrades and the rested states are all crucial.
It makes contextual as well as gameplay sense and it's been that way since the EA dropped. Building is more than a supplement, it's an integral part of the game.
I know you know this, I'm just reminding you.

It's not an issue of zoomers wanting to nestle and IG feeling compelled to sell out, just view H&H as the bite-sized update it is.
If the next *real* update should lack solid gameplay elements that would be more concerning, but I'll gladly give them the benefit of the doubt till then.

[warrenchmobile]

I can see your point but I must append a very big "Yes, but" to it. That is, despite what one may see on the Steam store page or what players may say in the forums, I don't think Valheim is a survival game.

For one thing, in the introduction before one is initially spawned into the Valheim world, one is not told that one's purpose is to survive in this new environment, but to conquer it for Odin. There is no indication he expects a viking to succeed in any given length of time.

For another, basic survival is not a problem by any stretch of the imagination. One does not have to eat, drink, or even rest to survive. The initial enemies a viking may actually have to fight, boar and greylings, are not exactly world beaters. The only pressure to face any real threat is self-imposed.

To put it another way, it is fairly easy for a viking to get into a situation where his or her posterior gets sliced, diced, fricasseed and handed back. It is also easy for a viking to avoid such situations. Trouble does not come looking for a viking; a viking must go looking for it.

The only way I would count Valheim as a survival game is if I joined a server with a pristine viking, no skills and just a rag tunic. A server on which earlier players had already stirred up raids and events and the spawning of non-native creatures in the Meadows biome.

[ULTRA]

The reason is because if a game were purely about survival then the extent of its content could be traversed within an hour or two. I'm not endorsing this or anything, just explaining why games are like this now. When a player has a token of what they've achieved (in this case through grind and often rather shrewd use of the building system) it gives them more of a sense of an overarching goal. Honestly it's kinda like real life. What do you do when you've managed to survive? You live.

AS FOR THIS GAME, why is a dead viking warrior concerned with this weird oikonomos of building up a homestead? Uhhh I dunno, it's just the genre I guess. It does make sense to me that it would be beyond Odin's power to just give you perfect equipment from the outset though.

[Pervy]

Originally posted by Zahiriously:

I am a bit sad that big updates and patches are "forced" to make more content on house building than the actual gameplay. These big updates/patches with focus on home design should rather be supplement to the actual game and not become the game.

To underline my point I do not mind getting content on homebuilding. I can enjoy building from time to time. However. I was expecting Mistlands to be complete before getting more food and home building designs. Alas, this is the direction sandbox games are going.

Nice bait.

[ᔑᓭ∴ᔑリ⊣]

"Majority of the population are hooked on home making and turn over from reality TV."
oh wow
i never knew the entire minecraft playerbase was reality TV fans
this makes perfect sense

But seriously, how do you even get to that conclusion lmao? i don't think i've ever seen a single person in my life mix up the average boomer/soccer-mum and the average video-gamer/nerd into a single audience before (of course those who are both exists, but they are definitely not the majority)

if you want a game that's purely about fighting and Anything except building, then go play a fighting game or a story-focus game, or literally any game that isn't put in the 'survival' or 'sandbox' category because these ones are not for you my buddy (what did you think 'sandbox' means??)
may i recommend some other key words to focus on instead, such as: RPG, MMO, fighter, open-world.. etc?

survival/crafting games put focus into base-building because, when you are trying to survive multiple nights somewhere without civilisation, it is only logical that you craft a shelter for yourself. and because it's a video game, people want to have FUN with that.

and this isn't even including the reasons why people create things just in general, which man i really hope you already know and i'm just misreading the implications of the OP, Otherwise you are one of the reasons i grew up in a salty vat of spite and unreadable steam usernames. lol
sorry, that^ kind of rubbed me the wrong way, so apologies if i come off as super rude here.. well, i'm not really sorry, that's a lie, but still

[Trakehner]

Originally posted by Zahiriously:

I am a bit sad that big updates and patches are "forced" to make more content on house building than the actual gameplay. These big updates/patches with focus on home design should rather be supplement to the actual game and not become the game.

To underline my point I do not mind getting content on homebuilding. I can enjoy building from time to time. However. I was expecting Mistlands to be complete before getting more food and home building designs. Alas, this is the direction sandbox games are going.

Like it really matters that much. Even if they had dropped Mistlands instead of H&H, most would of been screaming for more content anyway two weeks later (or less) after they sped through that content.

There is no pleasing gamers these days.

[M.Red]

imho the survival parts includes building shelters
and the homes made by people is something to show unless one wants to watch a viking collecting berries for 2 hours

so imho its a normal thing that people tend to show thir progress by showing the homes theyve made

tons of pics from homes may imply that people only build in valheim which is not the case
(excluding player who turn on the devmode for "creative mode")

in the current form of valheim the endgame is indeed more building than fighting but we are still in EA