I love survival games yet; I can’t play them alone. I have tried but I get bored quickly. However, with that being said, when my friends come online and we all jump into a survival game, the dynamic changes completely. We aren’t just playing a game; we’re hanging out, chatting while doing mundane tasks like chopping down trees or harvesting stone.

For example, Conan Exiles was recently added to Xbox Game Pass and my friends downloaded it. We’ve already had a few eveing where we played way past midnight. While building a little outpost, we spoke about the most random things. I actually can’t remember exactly what we spoke about, but at one point, I was just making my character walk around in circles while we were talking.

There’s something about survival games that makes it more of a social gathering than a game, and with everything going on in the world and the limit on social gatherings for safety’s sake, it’s nice to build a hut and play house with my friends, even if it is in a virtual world.

Sitting Around A Campfire

In a lot of ways, it’s like sitting around a campfire and hanging out. The pacing of survival games is quite slow (on a PvE server at least). So, we have a lot of time where we’re waiting for something to craft and we have the deepest conversations. Sometimes, we’re trying to figure out how we are going to build our little village. But other times we are freaking out and running away from a pack of angry and hungry hyenas who wandered towards out little shack.

Generally, survival games allow for a more social experience due to these long moments of waiting and when playing alone, this can be boring and lonely. Personally, I wouldn’t touch survival games if I had to play them alone, but with friends it really is better to survive together.