Survival modes in non-survival games

This is an on-going piece that I'll add to over time.  It is in no way complete and may be heavily revised.

The survival game genre is relatively new for the computer generations, yet has always been available for the tabletop RPG players if they adhered to the rules on food, disease and other aspects of games as given in the rules.  Most players and Game Masters ditched those as they were a lot of record keeping for very little play value return, especially in fantasy games where a mid-level character could call up food from thin air: that made 'survival' a trivial thing and was soon shelved along with the monthly checks for overall health and welfare of the characters.  When computers started to first present RPGs, the record keeping capacity was readily available and could be done in the background, but that wasn't the case as most game designers were coming from the tabletop RPG systems where survival needs had been shelved due to the gaming concerns above.  Thus it was absent from RPGs and took a kick-start from independent developers and modders to start adding survival modes into games that did feature them from the get-go.  My knowledge is thin on this, thus I'll use the few good examples of it in the Fallout and Elder Scrolls franchises, and I'm sure that many other games exist to demonstrate just how well or poorly the concept has been carried out.

For popular series the first exposure to survival mechanics for many players was in the 'hardcore' mode of Fallout: New Vegas.  This is a mode where staying well fed, well rested, hydrated and requiring much more overhead to take care of serious wounds was a requirement.  It was watered down due to time limitations, and the Josh Sawyer mod puts in a far deeper set of player mechanics that are not intrusive and yet need to be attended to regularly.  After that example the next are the types of mods that added survival mechanics into The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.  This included needs packages that dealt with some of the 'hardcore' basics of FNV, and then were expanded to include cold and winter survival for the Skyrim setting.  I will say that all of these can be challenging, fun and add a new dimension to a game that started out as a power fantasy or action fantasy game, although the learning mechanics would need to be tracked separately so that player characters could gain the necessary skills to utilize the resources they found for survival.  This continued to Fallout 4 with its own built-in system and with major mods coming in to change even those relatively exacting limits to something more realistic.

While the claim for these mods and changes done to the base game is that they add 'realism' into the game, they do not.  What they accomplish is to give the player a view of what survival might be like in such conditions for their player character.  This is built on a base game where survival is not part and parcel of the game, however, but an added 'feature' to make things more 'difficult' for the player and add in some fun and excitement.  This is done and then called 'immersive' and adding value to the game.  It does add play value, yes, and at the same time misses the actual point of survival: everyone and everything must be subjected to the same rules or rules adapted to their species.  To be fair in Skyrim there are mods available that puts in a predator/prey relationship system for animals and even has different ranks of predator and morale checks for things like packs of wolves versus a solo wolf.  With such mods comes added value and a degree of realism, it cannot be denied.  But what about everyone else in the world?

Trade and barter are done to exchange items of value in a fair exchange for augmenting or enhancing one's life, and at its core that means survival.  While some carts are seen in cities for vendors to sell their wares, generally farm carts with goods and a stall nearby, what we never see is the conveyance of enough food to keep a city alive.  That isn't true of just the Elder Scrolls or Fallout franchises, and can be witnessed in games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.  Novigrad has a bustling port area, that is a given, and NPCs are seen moving goods around (or sometimes faking it when the boss isn't looking) but for all that look of trade and transport we don't get to see ships coming and going.  Trade via sea requires that and after restocking with perishable goods, no ship will linger in port without reason.  Similarly perishable goods transported via ship need a way to be maintained and checked before quickly being off-loaded for sale at the port.  Thus a harbor with ships may be good for bringing cured or pickled goods, but for fresh market goods there is a requirement for farming (which we do see) and the transport of goods to market (which we will only see if a mission requires it).  Yet this is far better than the truly static carts in Skyrim and the lack of any good transportation capacity beyond pack animal in the Fallout universe.  Pack animals are good for high value, low weight goods that have enhanced value where they will be sold.  They aren't all that good for fresh market goods save for farms or other producers that have less than a day to travel to a market.  In the Fallout universe things are only put in a 'survival mode' recently, although the lore points out that there is still plenty of pre-war food available, which brings into question the citing of scarcity of same in trailers for the games.  There is something wrong with these concepts as presented: they just don't work.

Novigrad doesn't have enough farms and sea trade to keep its population fed.  Fishermen are only seen with a pole once in a rare quest, while actual ships hauling nets of catch are never seen at all.  Farms will produce some fresh produce regularly and have to be large if they are to fulfill the needs of a city.  The farms around Novigrad and those around Whiterun will not keep their populations fed and are short by a couple of orders of magnitude for the task.  Assuming late pastoral or even mid-Elizabethan technology and concepts like crop rotation, the farms that are seen are not producing enough foodstuffs for a small town in TW3 or Skyrim.  The laughable open farm area in Diamond City will not keep its inhabitants fed nor provide protein to the diet.  There is a meat seller that buys and sells such items, true, but they have no farm to rely on and never once is a pack animal seen inside Diamond City for off-loading its goods nor in any of the stadium bays on the outside to do a transfer there.  Hand-waving is done to explain it, not doing the realistic bit of actually working in a supply system and then having those serve as a means of transport and to have vendors get problems that they need help in solving.  Entire quests and perhaps even a game can be built on that alone and made interesting because everyone and everything will adhere to survival mechanics, but this is just at the strategic or grand theater end of things.

At the other end is the tactical, and that means that groups of individuals, be they the PCs party or a group of bandits, thieves, or raiders, will ALSO adhere to survival mechanics.  In a game like Skyrim one of the earliest quests is to Bleak Falls Barrow where a group of bandits/raiders/tomb robbers have set up camp and have an outer watch tower manned to warn them of threats.  Simply put there isn't enough food on them to survive more than 2 days.  Now there is a nice lake nearby and game animals lower down, so food can be found and even traded for with a hunter/fisherman at the mouth of the lake.  And the town of Riverwood isn't far from that, though they might arouse suspicion trading there more than once.  Tactically this is a group that came in for a smash and grab mission and found themselves without their leader and unable to figure out what to do next.

One solution on the part of a player would be to camp where they will not be observed but will be able to observe the goings-on at the Barrow.  Anyone sent out for hunting/fishing/trading can be a good target to start winnowing the ranks of the group, and remove their food resupply.  They can and should catch on to that, but without a good tracker, since the PC most likely removed them as they were out hunting/fishing, their woes have increased.  Without a leader and with limited and dwindling supplies the obvious thing to do is wait them out as the bandits are now in a poor survival situation.  Morale will fail and then the player who has provisioned themselves well can go forward without opposition.  All of that is done because food and water are vital at the tactical and individual scale.  Entire new methods of game play derive from this which include various forms of interdicting food, poisoning water supplies and carefully removing skilled individuals from a group or even a town or city so that the larger organization starts to run into problems.  When survival applies to everyone the entire game can, should and indeed MUST change.

Building a framework that is 'survival' based is not impossible, and the modding community has attempted to address this by overhauling everything in some games so that new systems are added into the game.  These are additions, however, and do not address the more serious problem that the base game never had these situations in mind.  For many of these games a means of Fast Travel was put in place because a number of Quests and tasks required that individuals traverse back and forth across expansive Open Worlds.  These missions when taken on in a 'survival' situation become arduous multi-leg journeys that may be as hard as the main story mission itself, yet they were designed as interesting side-content, often to just give a small bonus or interesting piece of equipment to the player.  There are so many of these types of missions in Open World games that it isn't funny, and while they can be seen as 'filler' content, some of them make little to no sense in a thorough 'survival' game concept.

The Gauldur Amulet side-quest in Skyrim requires traversing a good portion of the Open World going from Saarthal in the Northeast (and joining the Mages College to get to it) and then going from tomb to tomb gathering the three fragments of the amulet, to then rejoin them in the final site at the lower Southwest.  This is, arguably, more territory than the actual brothers held when they were alive.  And while it makes some sense to keep them entombed at some distance from each other, then there is no necessity to put the place where the amulet can be remade so far away.  In fact, you would never make such a place at all as the power of that amulet, when whole, was seen as the reason things went wrong.  It may have been overpowering at some very early era of Skyrim, but in the time of being the Dragonborn it isn't all that great, even as an early quest reward.

A better scenario would be to honor their father and place the three sons equidistant from his tomb, which would be at the center, and if the amulet is to be remade, then it would be there, perhaps with a blessing from their father who has looked on from the afterlife and wishes for his sons not to be forgotten but for their deeds to be always remembered and his family name brought square with that fact.  That would not only get the amulet, but start a possible new quest of finding ways to spread the word to scholars, bards and any other places of learning in Skyrim.  Getting the amulet wouldn't be the point: restoring the lore from nearly dead legend, that would be the point and it would be a social function quest with a survival basing of tombs and then the harder work can be done as the PC travels the land doing other things.

The survival framework as a concept isn't just for the player but for the entire world that is the setting for the game: past, present and future.  If people in the present need to take care of survival needs then so do those in the past and the future will be built upon the successful survival of the present.  A quest that has a defined geographic region based on rulers would then stay within those defined areas for the quest and not attempt to scatter places to go to outside of those areas.  The necessity of building tombs, putting in the proper structure for them and then the proper seals requires a dedicated workforce that must be fed, clothed, housed and generally maintained.  The Great Pyramids had extensive work camps built up around them that, though temporary, served to keep those working on the project fed and housed.  A large part of the workforce was not slave labor but a society based levy that was part of living there and, as such, most of the labor was local and the job of construction was not a full-time one for those who also had fields to tend to beyond their work at the Pyramids.  When seen in that light for a desert region in our world, the construction of large underground structures does require a vast labor force, and even with the capabilities of a more advanced group, like the Dwemer in the Elder Scrolls Series, that sort of construction was not done in days, weeks or months, but years and decades.  The same would be true of men in that world setting, save they would depend more on simpler tools instead of just coaxing material out of the way through harmony with it.  All of that depends on a workforce that can survive during the construction of the site in question.  Doing that multiple times at far distant locations, some not even within the proper domain of those doing the building, is more than a stretch of the imagination.  All of that is done to make a 'fun' quest, though, without thought to a survival framework.  Magic and such only gets these concepts so far, though some magical settings may help alleviate some of the problems, like the Dwemer understanding tonal qualities of reality to help in their tasks or the simple Clerics in Dungeons & Dragons able to conjure food out of thin air to feed large numbers of people, it is only an alleviation of some problems and those magical systems must, themselves, fit the setting and the survival framework and, thus, have limitations to them that are understood and comprehensible.

In a more advanced setting, or a fallen advanced one like the post-apocalypse of the Fallout franchise, much of the setting is based on the high-technology culture that got destroyed.  Those define the past capabilities of that society which must have, at its core, the ability to sustain its population via the means of production, processing, distribution and trade.  The abnormalities of the game setting to the description given to the end of the prior society are often at extreme odds with each other.  Describing the prior civilization as on the brink of collapse due to problems with food distribution is highly at odds with finding plenty of pre-packaged food that was processed for long-term shelf-life that is still edible: that was a society that planned for long-term food storage and had it in enough supply that even after the bombs dropped the PC can find enough of it to keep them alive (though slightly irradiated).  These two things do not fit together.

The shortages of energy supply were not as critical to the US as that alt-history had the US utilizing nuclear power from the end of WWII onwards.  Their reactor technology would be a marvel to us, in this world, as it was down-scaled for automobiles.  Advertising shows service stations that have gas, fission and fusion resupply, and that means that in parts of the US these three energy supply systems were in-place and utilized.  Other parts were still on the gas and fission systems, that is true, yet those two were enough to sustain vehicle transport of people and goods up to the day the bombs fell.  This was a highly mobile society that may have been polluting their environment with nuclear waste, but were able to move around the nation using not just nuclear powered cars but nuclear powered aircraft.  With the end of the war in Alaska against China, the US was then moving to invading the Chinese mainland and using the technological might it had developed for Alaska to that purpose.

In Fallout 4 one of the choices for the PC is the male veteran of the Alaskan Campaign, and that means there was a demobilization of some of those troops while others were recruited for the Chinese mainland assault.  Many of those people would have expected to be re-mobilized if the campaign wasn't going well, but the accounts and lore indicate it went pretty well right up to the day the bombs were dropped.  That is why the feeling at the start of FO4 is that of returning to civilian life.  No indications of food riots or massive food shortages are given there, in fact just the opposite is the case.  Survival necessities were taken care of by a highly sophisticated system of production spanning all the way from fertilizer production to farming to food processing for long-term storage to distribution of food stuffs.  There were other problems in the pre-war society that was driving it to internal conflict, but the amount of food left after the war indicates that food was not the problem.

The premise of Fallout as a franchise was the corruption of social cohesion due to the problems of the war.  A true 'survival mode' would reflect this in making pre-war food extremely scarce and a valuable commodity as it was created for extreme long-term shelf life so that a couple of centuries later it is still edible.  From that basis most if not all food available post-war is not of the pre-war variety due to its pre-war scarcity and then consumption immediately after the bombs dropped.  Vaults and other facilities with internal food processing systems would be seen as treasure houses as they would still be able to make food that isn't irradiated and have purified water, clean of all contaminants including nuclear fallout.  That stuff is priceless in the post-apocalypse and that is why the Vaults were constructed so solidly even when they were far outside immediate bombing targets.  That works as a concept, yet it must be dovetailed by demonstrating just how barren the wasteland is of pre-war food.

Yet for all the concentration on food, the lack of concentration on water is confounding.  An individual can survive for a week or more without food, but go a couple of days without water and that person is either unconscious or dead.  A rule of thumb is a gallon of water per person per day for general survival needs with light to moderate exertion and taking care of any minimal hygiene that requires water.  It doesn't matter what the game is, if it is constructed without that in mind, then there is no good way to add the water problem back into the system.  It doesn't matter if it is a medieval setting, a fantasy setting, or even a high-tech science fiction setting: the need for water is paramount and water weighs quite a lot.

Clocking in at 8.35 lbs/gal, water is not something that can be ignored in a survival setting.  Thus that 1 gallon/day of water is 8.35 lbs of at least sanitized water, which is to say pasteurized if not filtered or allowed to settle until only a small size range is left in suspension.  Purified water is water that has been filtered to remove the size range of suspended solids down to most single cell bacteria, and particular types of filtering can remove even those and viruses, and if put in sanitized containers ensures a long shelf-life of the water in properly sealed containers.  This is only for moderate exertion and minimal hygiene, and going beyond that requires much more water as combat is taxing on the body causing it to consume water at a prodigious rate due to sweat.  Animals that do not sweat have other means of dealing with this, but those also include changing water into vapor for rapid heat exchange.

The tactic of ensuring an enemy is deprived of water sources and must rely on only what they can cart or carry in is one that goes back to ancient times.  Outlasting a siege of a city, castle or fort requires access to water which can then be sanitized, or comes from an artesian spring which has water that has been naturally filtered by moss or permeable sedimentary rock formations.  Moss itself can provide clean, purified water just for picking it up and squeezing the water out of it during pure emergency situations.  Run-off above the tree line in alpine situations will feature uncontaminated water from melt water, so long as there are no animals at that altitude that use it as a water source.  Siege planning on the defensive side requires either deep wells or access to other forms of water sources, such as incorporating an artesian spring or creating forms of housing that is partially sunken and has layered moss and directed run-off on the surface.  Later city plans would include the use of sunken reservoirs or cisterns that allow for the accumulation of relatively clean water which can then be used if exterior sources are cut off during a siege.  Survival requirements in a game setting must go to the deepest of design elements due to the game systems which must address the actual concerns of those living in the game world as Non-Player Characters (NPCs).

Cities in medieval, historical or even fantasy setting must have water features for daily and emergency use.  Systems of common wells were in place in late Victorian Britain, and the spread of disease finally caused city planners to start addressing not just the water provisioning system but the sanitation system as a whole.  With water, food and a body comes sanitation requirements which most game designers will not touch as it requires some consideration of informing the player base that these are also survival needs.  Defecating and urinating in the woods is one thing, ensuring a safe means of clean-up yet another, and then covering or otherwise dealing with such sites a third so that local wildlife does not catch scent of it and investigate immediately.  Tracking animals by the spoor they leave, especially herd animals, is a good way of finding a meal on the move, and when survival considerations are implemented, humans are in the food chain, and unless well armed they are not at the apex of it.  Even villages have enough people to ward off all but the most determined or diseased predators as they have learned that attacking such places leads to at least injury if not death.  The smell of such settlements, alone, will warn off most predators, while some prey animals will move towards it sensing that predators shy away from them.  Once out of civilized environments, natural survival needs must be addressed as a fact of living, and even the best of 'full survival' games will fall short of this due to not wanting to gross-out potential players.  Yet for larger settlements and established ones, the open sewer running down the middle of the street is a health hazard, meaning that diseases can and will spread rapidly especially when wells are not deep enough or distant enough from those sewers to prevent contamination of the water they supply.  This is a game element that dictates the conditions people live under in built-up areas, and no matter how pleasing the design of a place is, if it is not based on the basics of water supply and sanitation, then it is not workable in a survival mode and will break immersion.

Some classes of beings that are beyond life will NOT adhere to survival based rules, although they will tend to have their own rules for survival or at least continued being.  Undead be they spirits or skeletons, will depend on either pure life force or will power to move, or have a magical means of animation that surpasses survival requirements and powers mobility through other means.  Mechanisms, like robots, will require other forms of maintenance and those lovely AI tyrants will require dedicated power sources lest the plug be pulled on them.  Those mechanics need to be addressed, as well, and are usually built on older systems which have fallen into disrepair.  Maintenance of equipment rears its ugly head and is the most hated aspect of games that attempt to incorporate the concept into them.  In the era before computers, tracking equipment condition was an absolute nightmare requiring either pre-made sheets for equipment that the players then manually updated to track equipment condition, or simply using a system in which equipment would break spontaneously under certain forms of use.  That is why an area effect condition that requires a saving throw versus that condition for equipment is a part of some games: it is due to the fact that manually tracking all equipment is tedious, time consuming and yields very little in the immediate game play 'fun' of a campaign.  In the modern era where computers utilize databases to track this stuff automatically, equipment condition can be shown not just as a numerical value but in the game by having levels of degraded equipment skins on models.  At a visual glance a player in a 3D game world can quickly ascertain just what condition equipment is in and NOT just those they carry, as this requirement is applied to each and every NPC, item and place in the game world.

Overhead and Maintenance is part of a budget for everyone and everything, but is generally known only in organizations as a line item with money applied to it so that people can be hired and equipment purchased to address those things covered in the budget.  Without training in the means and methods of upkeep, PCs would need to find other means to repair and maintain their equipment.  Few PCs will know how to tan leather, smelt ore to extract metals, cook, clean, find and create materials used to maintain equipment and on and on.  This is why division of labor is a foundation block of civilization: it is because it IS IMPOSSIBLE to learn all that there is to know for doing all the necessary things in life from top to bottom.  Short-cuts, rules of thumb, using 'expedient' methods and other short-hand for 'this works well enough for now'  get created so that MINIMAL essential tasks can be performed with only a little skill in a particular field.  Boiling water means you know how to sanitize water, hard boil eggs, and do a very basic amount of cooking which, while it may not be appetizing, will be sanitary and address survival needs.  Of course this requires a heat source and creating fire, so that must be at least at a rudimentary level, as well, or you will have to depend on others for it.  That is division of labor as it recognizes that some individuals will be very skilled at doing some tasks but may not be so good at others essential to survive.

One thing to keep in mind is the carry weight of the average soldier in the field.  Back in the days of the Roman Legion this was an approximate 150 lbs per soldier (with field support equipment taken in carts and other such conveyances).  That amount was for armor, minimal amount of food for a march, water for the march, weapons, basic hygiene and maintenance kit, and something that would let the soldier sleep with a barrier between their body and the ground plus possible overhead covering.  This was arrived at through necessity and soldiers in the Legion were also expected to be able to carry entrenching equipment and work as field engineers.  The idea was to stop early, fortify a camp, construct at least a deterrent ditch with spikes or sharpened poles set to wound if not kill attackers in the night, and then clear out the area and start setting up the camp waiting for the supplies to arrive.  If an actual fortified area to deprive a town or city of external communications was necessary then an entire Legion could do so in days or a week creating a circumvellation, which would then assign duties to soldiers for hunting, water supply and getting a basic medical system set up along with the towers and such that would be built with on-site materials.  While the technology has changed greatly since that day, the standard load-out for the average soldier on a daily basis is still 150 lbs.  And if no one likes to address water, then encumbrance is something gamers just hate but is a reflection of the actual real world and survival requirements of it.

Water is the main part of survival and without access to it an individual will die rather quickly.  The human body will produce water during the digestion process of foodstuffs, but that is not off-setting the daily intake requirement.  Food is required on a regular basis with enough caloric intake to allow for moderate physical activity on an on-going basis when an individual is isolated from the supply network.  The amount spent will vary, though it should  be below what highly trained athletes burn on a daily basis which can range to the 7,000 calorie/day range, far above the minimum suggested amount by various officials of 2,000 calories/day for low-level activity for people of low weight.  Getting edible and life sustaining food varies by climate, and plants can only provided a modicum of support in the way of tubers, fruits and some edible root structures.  Knowing which of those is safe requires experimentation if an individual does not have that information with them either via training or handbook.  Such experimentation is best done in tiny amounts and allowing for time to see if the results are harming the individual.  Even with a ready supply of certain fruits, the long-term lasting capacity of such plants outside of tropical regions is seasonal.  For protein the most ready source of high amounts of protein for body mass are insects, though the amount required to get enough to sustain even a low weight human is enormous.  After that are less predictable sources of protein such as reptiles and rodents, which require some skill and knowledge to hunt, kill, and then remove organs and skin so that the meat can be cooked.  Fresh water fish do provide edible protein raw, and requires skill at either hand fishing or line fishing.

Fire, it cannot be emphasized, is a critical survival skill.  With fire and a container that can be heated, water can be pasteurized and meat can be cooked to kill bacteria, viruses and parasites.  Cooked plant matter is easier to digest and yields more carbohydrates and minimal protein due to the heat breaking down some of the internal chemicals that would normally take place as part of digestion.  Fire is a way to light up a camp and make animals wary as it is generally not hospitable to be in a fire zone, particularly wild fires.  It is a good method to generate smoke to ward off some insects and start the process of clearing space around the fire of them for sleeping purposes.  It is not a survival tool in and of itself, but one that allows for the increased utility of all other supplies by allowing them to be relatively safe in the open, and creating a zone of warmth that the body does not need to generate which takes some of the overhead off of the body and replaces it with stored fuel consumption that isn't food.  Any sort of layer between the ground and an individual during sleeping periods means that body heat is not lost through ground conduction.  Adding in heated rocks around the body further reduces the overhead of internal body heat generation, thus reducing the number of calories needed to sustain oneself.  Gathering firewood is a tedious task and requires far more in the way of supplies than most individuals expect, and it is impossible to have too much readily available wood for burning.  With a fire comes the ability to create tools for hunting, trapping and even fishing in a zone of relative safety.  Surviving without a fire is possible, yes, especially if a goal of returning to civilization is one that can be easily achieved.

All of these concepts are something that must be available in a 'survival' scenario in a game at its core, not as an add-on to the existing game system.  What you get with this material being put in after a game is released comes in the form of impossibly distant goals and objectives that do not form around the survival mechanism unless they were thought about before the game was developed.  Large, expansive 'open worlds' are a major culprit in this as they do not feature enough settlements or villages to properly express the needs of the people living, working and traveling in the game area.  Indeed 'fast travel' became an invention for these games as there was little to no 'fun' in walking between destinations.  The ability of a game to keep the player's attention depends on the type of game it is.  In an action genre game the requirement first and foremost is ACTION and that requires relatively short periods between activities.  Having a player walk from place to place means they are spending much time out of action and are likely to downgrade both the game and its playing time due to this.  An 'open world' without plenty of random encounters or a means of getting around it quickly means that action genre fans will not take to the game very well.  In addition those games in the action genre tend to focus on limited inventory, constantly getting minor improvements to the PC in the way of equipment, weapons or levels, so that the feeling of progression is one that happens constantly via the action system.  Action based genres do not fit well into the survival mentality as a world chock-a-block with so many enemies would have quickly sorted itself out to just a few being left right at the start: survival needs would require that the overpopulation be thinned out immediately in a survival system.

RPGs do much better in the survival-based genre as a story can be told as the impetus to survive and the reason to push forward.  It need not be a very GOOD story but it must exist as a rationale for playing the game, else it become a survival simulator game (which is its own genre).  Player involvement with character design must emphasize that the world is survival based, but will have ranged weapons and equipment plus allow for crafting of new materials, food, sanitized water, etc. if the PC has the skills to do so.  From this a system of PC stats and skills results, and those must both have a direct relation to survival needs and requirements.  Typically a PC at the start of a game will be lacking in many skills and it is up to a good game designer to ensure that the starting area has just enough available to ensure survival to at least the next level up where a player will start adjusting their skill distribution to better suit their PC's stats and play style within the genre of game and to the story, itself.  Early levels can and indeed MUST focus on this, with a few breadcrumbs for the story available to keep the player interested in it.  Settlements, villages, towns and cities must be reasonably spaced in any area where there has been any sort of civilization set down, be it new or rebuilding from an apocalypse.  In the modern era it is forgotten that such small groupings of humanity used to crop up normally at approximately a full day of travel from a nearby and larger established community.  These were areas far enough away from the major community to be self-supporting or supported via trade with services offered generating enough income to keep everyone at the resting area fed.  In a game where it is right after a disaster that leaves no existing civilization standing (or one that strands a small group on a distant world to survive), this can be ignored save for the necessity of local resource scavenging when setting up a camp.  Setting up a camp and gathering supplies for it takes time, and that must be enforced as a game mechanic with a day/night or equivalent timing schedule.  As an RPG is about character building, survival must be worth doing as a part of character development and offer new ways to play based on different skill sets.  A PC that focuses on hunting may not forage well, and the opposite is true, and neither may be any good at setting simple traps or fishing.  What the player determines is a method that suits their play style will then be directly reflected in the PC's stats, skills and what they make for themselves.  In an RPG the destination is the driver, and walking to get to it must be an inherent part of game world design.  It cannot be empty travel, however, and should offer many non-action features and interactions with the world based not on just NPCs but opportunities for expanding survival needs and requirements.  Forms of faster travel should be available after the opening few levels of the character, and must be balanced in the game world for cost, distance, and the sort of person the PC is as reflected by what they do and how skillful they are in interacting with others.

Finally there is the bane of respawning enemies in an area or environment are a bane to survival concepts.  Any group of enemies, be they predators of the animal or human variety, require a much larger number of smaller prey in a nearby region to remain alive.  This is their territory and its borders will be marked as such, though in different ways by different forms of predator.  Concentrating on the human sort, this will usually mean totems of one sort or another placed at the edges of their roaming zone and some form of raiding outside of it on neighbors.  Neighbor-based warfare is as ancient as humanity, and usually creates some stricter sets of guidelines within the groups doing so as bringing one group down to the point where they cannot survive as a group will mean they have no survival goods to raid.  Given many lifetimes the raids will start to be the mere showing of force and can become an actual non-violent encounter as this form of being fierce becomes a part of both cultures.  Displays of force with rare actual raids and those used to show courage or bravery become the norm, not the exception, and should be taken into account for game world design based on the history the developers wish to present.  In action games, however, these sorts of opponents are rarely if ever shown, and the normal encounter is with fully hostile opponents that must be eliminated.  After being eliminated the zone is marked internally as cleared and then is put on a timer which will respawn enemies there to be knocked down once more.  This is not only insane in a survival based world, but poor game design in general.  Why?

In a survival based world once a group is eliminated any re-population of that area would take time which would not be measured in hours or days and might extend up to months, years or never.  If no enemy is left alive and none are buried, anyone seeking to go into that area will see the remains of what happened there and be frightened off, and that is particularly true if there is no record of who or what brought this group down.  Scavengers, human and animal, would appear but be furtive, wary and tend to run off at the very first sight or sound of anything approaching.  Once the bones have been picked clean a few wary types might decide to make camp and stick around for a better look around, yet the remains would be littered about as there is no reason to bury them at that point in time.  In the true wilderness a carcass can be reduced to bones in approximately 2 weeks, mostly by insects of various sorts and their maggots.  In more harsh environments there are still some insects but larger scavengers or carnivore/scavengers would arrive to get what they could as opportunists.  The respawn in such an area would be those things doing the scavenging, not a thorough respawn of the prior population with different names or as generic enemies.  In fact word would spread as more than one of these groups is eliminated in a region, especially if they are neighbors.  For human communities there would be an information system which would allow for situationally appropriate information to travel.  A spread of something taking down scavengers, bandits, raiders and doing so methodically, one at a time, would be a source of fear for some and a cause for hope for others.  Re-spawning groups takes away from immersion in a survival game, save for some of the lowest of opportunist scavengers and the slow re-population of browsing based animals that feed on plants.

Just in terms of game design, areas that re-spawn remove the concept of 'accomplishment' for the player and is done to allow for a player to churn through an area to get experience and loot multiple times.  If the game world is so empty and so devoid of interesting things that reward the player, then the game, itself, has a major problem.  Games that are padded out with re-spawning enemies (save for portals to the dimensions of the dead and the such) are indicative of poor game structure and design, especially in an open world setting.  Not only is the concept of 'satisfaction' moved from a top tier one and relegated to one that the same task must be accomplished over and over again, but actual meaningful game play does not ensue from repeated removals of enemies in an area.  Grinding through an area for the 5th, 7th or 20th time means you know exactly what the setting is as a player, and can pre-plan to the point where movements and attacks can be timed based on pre-scripted NPC activity.  There is little to no 'fun' in doing that, and is unrealistic to the point where immersion is broken completely as it indicates that the player is doing busy work for something the game design could not adequately cover in the way of non-repeatable quests and rewards.

In Bethesda Game Studios terms these are 'Radiant Quests' and they went from being something that could be easily ignored in Skyrim to something actively abused in Fallout 4.  Just for normal, non-survival game play, this is a low point in action based gaming where the game designer cannot think up of enough different activities to keep the action fresh and new throughout the conception space of the entire game.  The more widely known term for these are 'Filler Quests': the quests to keep the player busy with meaningless work, minimal reward and with the hope that some minimal Pavlovian response system will keep the player coming back for more and liking it.  Not only is this bad for game design but is an active insult to players, especially in the action level genre as the game designers cannot think up of enough fun action over the course of extended game play to keep the player interested in playing the game.  In an RPG it is inexcusable, thus in an Action RPG it is horrific game design creating an air of futility of activity, removing accomplishment and constantly giving the player busy work as the people designing the game couldn't be bothered to do their job and properly structure the game to have enough content and then remove much of the mechanics from both Action and RPG, so as to create this type of game that attempts to be both but is neither.

Thus the reasons that adding in a 'survival mode' to non-survival games comes down to basic world design.  If the concept of 'survival' is embraced then large cities must have a support network for food and trade.  Smaller towns and villages would be spaced frequently enough to offer the weary traveler time in a protected setting to rest and recoup from their journey.  Campsites would be established along trade routes, indicating frequently used areas that may have scarce wildlife or vegetation that can be used as food, but should have a decent source of water that can be sanitized.  Campsites would tend to shift over time as firewood is removed in the vicinity of one site and a new one is established nearby over a few years.

Starting from a civilized environment, the PC would have rudimentary survival skills and knowledge and be able to do a few, very simple tasks: boil water, know how to start a fire (though perhaps not the skills to start one), and some of the basic edible plants and animal parts from the local environment.  If the PC is stranded and away from civilization, without even the most basic survival tools, then the requirement is to apply what few skills they have and to learn how to perform enough bushcraft to create a few tools used for immediate survival with being able to find or make sanitized water a top priority.  Returning to civilization would normally be the goal in such a game, though if it is after a cataclysm that brought down civilization, other options will have to be implemented.

Farms, homesteads and other places that exist must be a part of the larger network of trade and be self-sufficient for the long-term with survival needs in mind.  If the world features magic, there would be the application of magic to such requirements, and note that in the old D&D games even low level Priests and Druids had a few spells that could help in survival situations, although those tended to get shelved after players and GMs shelved the entire survival concept from the game due to encumbrance issues.  How the very world is set up and what the setting are then creates the game play space so that it conforms to the larger set of ideas that drive it.  A non-survival game mode will then offer an immersive environment, though one without the stress of survival but the indication that it drives the entire game evident at every turn.  One run in a non-survival mode will be a very different experience than one with survival mechanisms turned on, save that the rest of the world will still always be in survival mode.

That should be the point in such a game, not an add-in and afterthought.  Fallout: New Vegas has its 'hardcore' mode for needs and requirements and all the items in the game have their own values in such a mode which will change how the player approaches the world.  Items once sold as easy to dispose of commodities soon become important to survival and something a player will be reluctant to start with, which explains their pricing in the game world.  A survival category RPG must also feature a rich set of stories, decisions and options based on the underlying mechanics of the game.  Bandit or raider groups don't survive off of a single farm that can barely support the people on it.  That would require multiple farms, and require a much better structured group than the normal bandit or raider outfit can sustain.  Historically these peoples would tend to form the first City States as they were able to bring their own form of order and protection to those under their control. 

Larger systems would be built on top of this, but sheer survival requires that the organizations that started out as bandits or raiders turn into something a bit more durable and a bit more accountable if they wished to survive.  Survival needs forces its way into every aspect of society and a game designed with this in mind will offer structures and mechanics for the game genre appropriate to bring these concepts across.  This is something that can be added into a game but only if an entire re-vamp of the entire game is performed to make sure every one and every thing is put into the new mechanics that are being implemented.  That requires a bit more than just making the new system, but being able to figure out new stories to tell based on the new game mechanics: this isn't about 'difficulty' in the end, but to create a world that adheres to the logic of survival from the ground up.

Thus adding in a 'survival mode' to an existing game is not just a simple concept of making it 'harder' for the player.  While they are fun modes, if the game world isn't designed with that in mind, then the added in system will not mesh well with the existing system without a complete overhaul and revamp of the existing game.  At that point any modification to the game is an overhaul mod as it must encompass everything that has already been done and then sort through what makes sense and what doesn't under the new paradigm.  Our modern world is built with those survival concepts as a key, and civilization in the modern age is very vulnerable to any of the major sub-systems failing or simply ailing when it doesn't meet the survival requirements of the civilization.  Starvation, lack of clean water, sanitation and all the rest that is considered 'normal' in our world is built around survival needs at its heart, not at the periphery.  A simpler analysis of a game world setting means re-adjusting an existing game so that the places the player gets to and the countryside they go through make some sense. 

Humans will live in squalor if there is no other option in a city, but the moment there is an option they will then begin to clean up the squalor and mark out property based on work done to clear out the squalor.  Why?  Disease, malnutrition, lack of sanitation leading to the former, and the concept that if you don't own it you don't need to maintain it.  That is not the preferred living option for humans, by and large, unless they are forced to by economic, cultural, or military concerns which are considered to be of higher priority.  Only if humans are kept in virtual containment in such conditions will they live in such marginal areas.  And if there is anything that is attractive to living in squalor over living outside of it, such as a much worse poverty further away from cities, then that will be the only thing keeping people there: 'better here than anywhere else where it is worse'.  The moment actual title can be granted to land in squalor and that title enforced, then the squalor will begin to disappear as individuals can begin investing in their future, which means more non-marginal mouths to feed, true, and that must also mean expansion of the agricultural base and civic infrastructure.  With limits on agriculture, funds, and jobs, squalor will appear if even the most menial labor means better survival or safety (or both) as opposed to living outside of it.  In medieval circumstances these were the people living outside the castle and the town that would grow up outside that to service the needs of the fortified structure.  In warfare these places are over-run at the beginning of a siege unless those making the siege perform a circumvellation to enclose all of that so the besieged must figure out what to do with suddenly starving population outside their walls.  Squalor and poverty were an offensive tool in warfare of that era, make no mistake about it, and actually predates the medieval to the very first sieges of cities and fortifications in the history books.  Yet squalor and poverty are also a part of the human condition and part of a survival system: it is the messy, nasty and harsh side of things that survival systems normally don't include as they don't tend to be teen friendly and can't be put into a marketing pitch.  Added in survival systems generally don't implement it as it requires hours upon hours of work to show just what bare survival looks like and just how lucky the player is NOT to be in such conditions.  Getting coders and modders up for that is a difficult task and usually has few, if any, takers.

As a gamer I can appreciate the work that is done and just what those adding in the survival system are trying to accomplish.  High kudos for the hard work!  Truly amazing stuff that, if the game industry ever got its collective heads out its sphincters, they would examine and take to heart.  Far easier to build a survival system and world space from the ground up and then remove mechanics as an option for those seeking the stories in the world than to try and add it in as an after-thought.  I bring no aspersions upon those doing the hard work to make for entertaining options in game play.  What I can do is point out that the base games are woefully lacking in design terms to be suitable for such activities.  When a game developer does try to do this and they are not familiar with the game mechanics and reasoning behind what they are implementing, well, it usually doesn't go well.  You get something like Fallout 76.  A game that was published with no clear idea of what it was truly trying to accomplish and with a system that didn't encompass survival on the large or small scale very well.  Without a good story, without an environment that reflects the survival system, which is to say everyone and every thing must abide by it, you get busted game mechanics, and strange ideas on what a person can and cannot use with hard locks based on level.  That isn't good game design for a survival game, period.  Saying a person can't use that weapon or piece of armor because they aren't high enough level to figure out how to pull the trigger or use the straps on the armor is asinine and insult to gamers.  Everything is grist for the mill in a survival situation because that is part and parcel of surviving: making what you have work for you, even if not very well.  Or scrapping what you find, even if you don't do it well it will still yield some parts that can be useful.  And that isn't even addressing the ability to throw meat into boiling water and making something a bit more edible out of it.  Yeah it may not taste all that good, but it is nutritious and it is cooked, aiding digestion.  Recipes are made of throwing other stuff in to cook it together in the hopes it might taste a bit better.  And then there is just throwing meat on the fire and turning it over to cook it.  No real recipe needed for that...skill to get the meat, yes, but a rack of ribs can be pretty easily hacked off a carcass with the right tools.  Why tools are considered 'junk' items is beyond me and goes totally contrary to survival concepts.