This is the year open-world survival crafting games can shine

polygon.com:

The first big video game hit of 2024 was Palworld, a game everybody thought would be “Pokémon with guns” but turned out to be an open-world crafting game where you capture monsters — called “Pals” — and put them to work on your base, creating resources and tending to various areas. People came for Pokémon and stayed for the gameplay, to the tune of 19 million players reached during its initial January release period.

Not too long after that, we got Enshrouded, an open-world survival crafting game now in Steam Early Access that puts players in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world and tasks them with running around gathering resources and building out a base. Then, there was the gothic Nightingale, followed by driving sim Pacific Drive. There are even more to come, too, with Lightyear Frontier, Outcast — A New Beginning, Dune: Awakening(yes, that Dune), and one based in the Terminator universe, to name a few.

The “Open World Survival Craft” game (as Steam labels it) isn’t the newest video game genre on the block. While they come in distinct flavors, games like The Long Dark, Rust, and Conan Exiles have been keeping players occupied for years. However, it’s looking like 2024 might be the year the genre hits a new high. With the lack of blockbuster games being released and many people looking for a change of pace from the usual catalog of multiplayer live service or single-player linear experiences, open-world survival crafting games might provide the answer.

There are a lot of unique takes and varying degrees of difficulty in this space, but the idea is always that you collect resources in the game’s world and use them to keep yourself alive, make weapons and other gadgets, build a base, or just let your creativity fly. Most importantly, the player needs to believe that they can do almost anything. That freedom will differ on a game-by-game basis, but ensuring that the player has some degree of it is key to keeping them playing for dozens — maybe even hundreds — of