Game service models

I took a look at video from Game Wisdom on the Paradox model of sales for post-launch content expansion in comparison to other 'games as a service' model of games and games that rely solely on DLC content to expand game play.  Paradox Interactive is a game publisher for design studios under it (Paradox Design Studio) and many other game developers that are not, necessarily, held by Paradox Interactive.  As Paradox Interactive publishes games tend to cater towards the Grand Strategy market it has some positives and negatives going for it versus other publishers for developers in the standard 'games as a service' model area.

The first area of major difference is that many of its publishers host boards on PI seeking feedback into their games.  PDS does this and includes feedback from its developers who work in conjunction with the feedback which often spurs on discussions that lead to future content.  This is not unique to PI as other publishers will do this.  What separates PI and its Developers is that this takes place not in the typical Shooter or Action genre with high-paced, fast action are the norm.  There the 'economy' of a game is important especially for free-to-play titles that need in-game linked 'monetization' to garner income for further development.  The compelling game loop of such action games requires constant updates, refreshes and attempts to further monetize the game via expansions and new items to purchase.  As 'Surviving Mars' is the game that is brought up as problematical, it should be asked: does it fit into the action category?  No, it does not.  It is part of the Grand Strategy game group utilizing a Paradox methodology for continual feedback and improvement for new game material.

Thus the second part of the problem presented for this game: it was released without key features that most city-builder games require and was seen as such by the gamers who purchased it.  Further the first DLC fills in those holes, yet requires a separate purchase.  Once filled the game plays in a substantially different way than it did at launch.  Rightly criticized for this, the move was to address fan needs in a paid for expansion.

Does this happen in other PI published Grand Strategy games?

The methodology of Paradox for Grand Strategy or City Builder type games is to improve the game playing process via a dual track of paid-for content as DLCs and free updates to the base game, often addressing the problems of DLC integration into the game.  This has happened with Crusader Kings 2 and, more importantly, Stellaris.  Players of the base game of Stellaris would understand the major game mechanics as a system within the base game, and yet if they purchased all the upgrades at one shot and updated the game, they would be unprepared for the complexity that greeted them in Stellaris.  Everything has been revamped, sometimes via DLCs and sometimes via patches.  What Stellaris didn't have was missing fundamental game mechanics required for its genre: as a game it was playable, enjoyable and didn't require DLCs to make a complete experience.

In the City Builder genre my recent experiences are limited and historical game playing of prior generations of games only gives me some overall and broad knowledge of City Builders, yet the fundamentals of income, management of resources and expansion should remain.  If any of the basics of how to gather resources (or garner them via trade or general income), order up buildings to be built, and then have an infrastructure to maintain said structures (with Overhead and Management costs) were not well integrated or missing from the game, then it can be said to be broken and not worthy of being a finished game.  If there were items that were required that were physically impossible to purchase or required far more resources than could ever be gathered, no matter the size of the city (or base), then the game has shipped with broken game mechanics and lack of game balance.

Those are immediate criteria for a City Builder style of game and can be generalized into: never show a player something they should be able to do and then deny them the path and means to do it.  And that is a touchstone for all game types, without respect to genre.  Hiding the way to get it is allowed and that requires player ingenuity to find, yet the path to it must be available in the game.

Game mechanics must reflect what is allowed to be done in the game, and if the player is unable to do them then a pathway to doing them must be contained in the game.  To facilitate that a User Interface will be used as the means of explaining content, showing what can be done, and what else is available to the player.  Additionally any history or background material can also be given in the UI, so that the player can better understand game mechanics which they may gloss over to just start the game.  This often requires a tutorial game in which game mechanics are shown to the player via the UI, so that the player understands how what they have learned is then implemented within the game.  A tutorial is not required and simply bringing up hints in minor on-screen boxes or information areas is another way to do this so as to not interrupt game play, yet still offer information.

What is the model that Paradox uses, in general, on games it publishes?  It is an odd system, to say the least, though it depends upon a non-broken and relatively polished game shipping that may have a few bugs, and is then patched to get rid of them.  As a publisher, the design studio is then on task with a successful game to start adding in more content on a regular basis, and this has worked well in the Grand Strategy genre with updates to already published games adding in more story content, new game mechanics and new ways to play within the existing framework.  The recent "Holy Fury" DLC for Crusader Kings 2 opened up Pagan Reformation, which had been added via prior content, but regularized it with a set of game mechanics that may or may not be good but are well understood and integrated into the game.  This opened an entire new category of play that features much variation and allows for the changing of game play for Pagans while not changing much for the standard religions.  The Stellaris MegaCorp DLC added a new form of corporation built on franchising, then put in additional government ethics including a criminal type.  It was now possible to create a MegaChurch or Interstellar Criminal Syndicate that both operate like a MegaCorp, and each has its own ways of approaching the game within those restrictions.  A recent story DLC featuring archaeology, artifacts and relics added in many new back-stories and put in some new game mechanics for the use of said artifacts and relics.  Some of the stories are short and others span multiple sites, and not all endings are happy for the past or present, either.  This has been going on for years.

By including end-user feedback and mod creation for many of its games, Paradox the publisher encourages the design studios under it to participate in the user community to the point of actual developers holding weekly or monthly dev meetings to discuss what they have found inside their individual game communities.  What happens is that the individual games have core mechanics updated and enhanced, and then purchased DLCs integrate with those updated core systems, which allows developers to have a wide range of issues to work with and take in the feedback to create new content and systems for the game engine.  Getting into CK2 or Stellaris, at this point, becomes a heavy cost proposition for potential players who must be enthused enough about the genre and game, itself, to then put in far, far, far more than $60.  While some groups of DLC are bundled and discounted and cosmetic packs, music packs and such tend to come in at extremely low or no cost, the cost of getting into CK2 might actually stop potential players from picking up the game if they do not understand how the game is supported.  It is possible to pick and choose from the DLCs and still have a perfectly playable game.  With Stellaris the entire way of playing has been radically altered, so playing the base game is in no way similar to playing it with expansions added in: the core mechanics have been extremely refined, the economics improved and the effects of that are now for every government type and every play style.  Stellaris was very playable upon release, but now it is a more detailed simulator that requires far more attentive game play than it did on release.  That is not a bad thing, but it is something that does happen to Paradox published titles.

The model is to publish a strong base game with good game mechanics with content to make for satisfying game play and good to excellent replayability.  After that extra content is provided by DLCs either via Story Packs that can tweak existing game mechanics (sometimes adding in new, story oriented mechanics) or full DLC extensions with new game mechanics that can fundamentally alter and extend existing mechanics.  There is a strong feedback loop with developers having sites with the publisher so that fans can interact with the development studio and its personnel, so that the personnel can give an idea of what they are doing and fans can give feedback on areas where the game has areas that are lacking in robust elements, where stories may not feel 'complete' and should be extended or polished, along with outright bugs to the game.  Included in this are Quality of Life issues on everything from the interface to the game (which can often be opaque to the new user) to addressing base game problems for building, extending and interacting with game elements (or the lack of some elements entirely).  That is a good and strong model which very few other game companies even try to do and is almost completely unknown in the AAA part of the game community.  As smaller studios in the Paradox publishing domain understand that continuous feedback with the gamers and fans of the game is essential to game longevity, there is a different view taken with that active game community trying to service them with free updates to the base game mechanics AND add in new content that the developer wants with fan input.

If Surviving Mars has deep and fundamental problems with its game play, game mechanics and Quality of Life as compared to Cities Skyline or any other equivalent builder style game, then that is a black mark for Paradox as a publisher and its game development studio.  The requirement is to have a complete and relatively well polished game go out the door, and that game is eminently playable and replayable with no major bugs, glitches or game mechanics issues: it must be a solid and good game.  The 'ship now, fix later with DLC' concept is not only poor but unacceptable to gamers who have come to expect quality content from Paradox publishing and points to poor QC on their part and not holding their developer accountable for shipping a game that was not solid and good at the outset.  That is because the publisher and developer depend on a long-lived game model where a game can continue expanding and offering new game play to satisfy existing fans and entice new players to the franchise. 

Crusader Kings 2 was published in 2012 the year after The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was published (and did wrap up its DLC content in 2012), and 3 years before The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was published.  From that CK2 is an old, old game, yet it is continually refreshed and expanded with new content, new stories, new game play mechanics and free downloadable content that offers some nice bits an pieces for how units look and music, as well as some user oriented piece to allow for customizing the at-start ruler the player wants for their next run.  A 7 year old game that is continually patched, updated, and has new content coming out for it on an annual or bi-annual schedule, with further depth of game play done for the fixes is something that no other publisher attempts to do outside of the MMORPG realm.  Yet this is a Grand Strategy RPG.  Likewise Stellaris came out in 2016 and had a lot of new content coming out for it early on, and still receives attention for new Stories and thematic game play extension with proper DLCs.  Getting Surviving Mars FIXED so that the fans are satisfied and then finding a way to deal with the black mark (either real or just perceived) of a game that wasn't fully finished on launch is vital and necessary for Paradox publishing.  Fixes could include something like adding in the DLC to the base game for free or for a very minor charge as bundle, combining the two pieces and calling it Surviving Mars Enhanced (or something similar), and giving those who bought the base game a refund for the first DLC if they purchased it and sending it out for free to those who have the base game but not the DLC.  Fixing community relations must be a top priority as Paradox publishing has a reputation of satisfying the fan community so that those fans will continue to buy updates for the long haul.  Look at CK2 and Stellaris to get an idea of what that means for long-term revenue for the companies involved.  Hurting that reputation and not fixing the problem will start to make current gamers leery of new titles from Paradox publishing, and might start to turn off some existing fans when they see how another fan base is being treated by the publisher.

Shipping broken or perceived to be broken games is not what Paradox does for publishing.  The rest of the industry does it to get easy money up front and then may decided to drop a broken game after it has made its initial money back or if players are not supporting new content.  That is a disease that will kill Paradox as a publisher and many of its studios as the model they work from is the exact opposite of that.  This can be fixed as the first DLC for Surviving Mars is seen as a major fix to the problems the game had at launch, and the solutions are obvious on how make good as a company that relies on a business model for long-term survival.  I dearly hope that this is fixed, even though I don't normally play in that genre, it did look interesting as a game but seemed a bit generic.  After playing other games published by Paradox and looking at what it takes to get financially involved with games that have been continually supported for years, it is safe to say that this business model is easy to see.  Screwing it up is easy, too.  Fixing the reputation after screwing it up takes guts and determination to actually realize that a game was shipped without being properly finished and making good on finishing it and then finding a way to mollify players who purchased the broken game.  They don't even have to apologize openly, just fix the problem and make sure that existing players have a complete game experience that was promised at launch.  That is easy to do, though a bit hard on the bottom line as it admits to screwing up internally.  The player base doesn't care about that: they want the promise that was made, not the paid for completing of the game after it was launched as feature complete.  This doesn't even have to be a 'real' problem but a perceived one, and fixing the latter even if the company believes it isn't a real problem is essential: long-term sales and annual revenue from new content is how this works at Paradox and screwing it up at start means lowered long-term revenue.

I like this business model!  It does require ethics and commitment to producing and publishing games that players like, giving players a means to interact with the developers and then giving an idea of what areas new content will be in to build enthusiasm among players.  Feedback and incorporating external ideas means that games can be expanded in new and different ways, often beyond what the original developer had ever thought about.  The result is good games that addresses the player base, incorporates ideas from the player base and then seeks to make sure that this is known to that same player base.  That is a service model that ISN'T 'games as a service', that's for damned sure.  And that doesn't even get into the aspects of how modding is generally encouraged and means for custom player made content to be added into the game made known.  With an extensive and even officially recognized fan modding area, many developers now get to see how their games are repurposed to other venues.  Try and get that from AAA gaming today.

Things in CK2 that just seem surreal

And I'm not talking about following your  heart, becoming a Waldensian, having a few kids married into the family from the Byzantine Empire, getting one of them called back and putting said kid, now converted, on the throne.  No, that is actually not that far out, given the game.  Likewise rowing out to visit scenic R'lyeh is par for the course, if you just make a few of the right... or wrong... decisions while watching the stars.  Actually that stuff isn't that strange.

What is strange?  The monetary system.

Remember that back circa 769 to 1456 AD there was no standard coinage in Europe or much of anywhere else.  What was put in place was the gold piece system, that fantasy RPG players have come to know and utilize across so many games, starting with D&D, that it is just commonly accepted.  Yet the GP in CK2 isn't a gold piece, but represents a much larger quantity of gold than the normal Player Character in any RPG would tend to have in their pockets.  And the cost of getting things built is way out of whack...I mean, seriously so.  And it is to be remembered that this is in the era before the discovery and exploitation of gold resources in the New World which caused some major economic problems for those doing the importing as the value of gold dropped.

Coinage tended to center around varieties of copper, bronze, and other metals, including silver.  The silver mines at Joachimsthal that became the source for minting the Thaler, from which the name 'dollar' is derived, but that was in post-CK2 times, just a fun little tidbit.  Within the CK2 time there was a currency that was locally well known in England and that was the pound (£) which was minted from a pound of silver, back in the old Anglo-Saxon days, and the Hanseatic League didn't debase their coin, the Easterlings, so tradesmen asked for payment in pound sterlings, shortening Easterling up a bit.  The Anglo-Saxon coin had 350g of silver, and serves as a ready basis for coinage in the era of CK2 which starts just after the Saxons getting to the British Isles in numbers after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.  After William I conquered his way in with the Normans, his son, Henry I, guaranteed that coinage would not be debased as well as following all the other traditions set in place for the rights of the nobles.  With the Hanseatic League (as a concept, they might not show up in CK2 at all) that helps to span the CK2 timeline with at least on reliable currency, the pound sterling.

Now in the British Isles, just prior to 1400, came the offensive use of castles in Wales that would drain the budget of England for about a decade.  The smallest of these castles for cost was Conwy that ran about £ 15,000.  The most expensive, reported to be the entire budget of England for the year, was Caernofon at about £ 25,000.  At 1400 the first of the gold coins in England was produced, which was the noble (9g of gold), which had a conversion rate of 3 nobles for £ 1.  The noble coin was not in great circulation but steps in the direction of the first gold pieces produced in quantity that is readily convertible with a known coin for the era of CK2 (though just at the end of it, to be sure).

The cost of those castles included land surveying (at least as much as there was in the era), working to clear, drain and otherwise get the site ready for building, and then the start of actual construction for a modest castle that would hold 100 to 300 men-at-arms.  This wasn't for a castle complex with multiple wall systems and such, nor was it a stand-alone Keep (or Keep integrated into a castle), but the actual relatively low walled fortified structure that allowed for quick staging of forces, warning of emergencies and passing information about enemy troop movement to friendly forces.  This could be built out over time and get rather complex with support camps turning into small towns, and then the expansion of those and the castle itself over time.  A few castles would actually become the start of cities that surrounded them and then became separate civil organizations as the castle wasn't meant to handle that sort of administrative work (by and large with many exceptions).  Basically this was a castle that would be seen in many variations before and just after that era.  Some were cookie-cutter, others evolved in style and quite a few no longer served a purpose and were abandoned as politics and trade shifted across the landscape.

In CK2 the cost of building a castle varies greatly, with the lowest I've seen around around 400gp and the highest around 900gp (the last spot in a highly built up and prospering area with other cities, temples and castles already there).  Now as the places in Wales were not highly built-up, that variation of £ 15-25,000 seems pretty good...but what is that in actual gold?  I mean if we convert it into nobles, then that is 45-75,000 noble coins.  For ease of comparison lets say that the initial castle clearing, building and such in CK2 is 500gp for something the size of Caernofon, and that would make 1gp = 150 nobles.  Great!  There is a 1400 equivalence for a generalized mid-range built-up area slot in CK2 with a currency in circulation just after the building of a castle that can be used to Wild Ass Guess on the rest of the game, but with some actual backing.  Who knew?  Is this a 'good' coin to choose?  Probably not, but it is easily convertible with known weights and comparisons to a known coin that (though slightly debased by this era) was still supposed to represent a weight of something widely accepted in the timeframe of CK2.    It is convenient and can be readily adjusted up and down, but has some actual comparison basis to start with.

So the cost of getting the walls beyond the basics to Level 2?  Well that is around 66gp, which is 9,900 noble coins or £ 3,300.  A bargain!  And a Keep for a castle, basic, runs about 250gp, which is 37,500 noble coins or £ 12,500...pretty much the cost of Conwy castle.  Ooops!

Now what isn't factored into this is the slot system CK2 uses, which is a generalized pre-determined place ready for building a temple, a city or a castle, because they are all the same, right?  Note that in the real world, things don't work like that.  So the cost of those castles in Wales INCLUDES the equivalent of slot clearing in CK2, because reality doesn't work like CK2.  How much does that cost?  Well, from what I've seen in discussions and by in-game use, it is 150% of your annual budget to open a single slot in a single province...from lowly Count to Emperor, this number SCALES to the size of your economy for a SET PIECE OF LAND CLEARANCE.  By setting it at the cost of what you have as net income plus 50%, the cost of clearing a slot in CK2 is greater than the cost of the actual building to be built on it.  In other words first you pay for the generalized slot and then you pay for the thing to be built on it.  So that use of Caernofon had the 'slot' cost built into it and the entire thing came out to the entire net income of England for a year.  If there is no pre-cleared 'slot' then you will pay more for the equivalent of building slot than you will for the real life cost of clearance and building COMBINED.

So that readily convertible amount?  Yup, doesn't work, though it should.  In fact, by scaling costs to the economy, the game is intentionally trying to force you to keep a large amount of cash on hand to deal with the other, non-building effects of CK2.  It is a game of nickel and diming the player CONSTANTLY. Your Steward wants roads?  Pay up.  Want a better harbor?  Again, pay up and be prepared to keep on paying, periodically and NOT set up an office to do that work FOR YOU.  Yes in real life the Liege would set up an office with some minor functionary who is DELEGATED the responsibility and a tiny fraction of the income from the port (or city or whatever) that would leave a lower net amount in revenue but ensure that the roads are kept up, the harbor properly administered and cleared, and generally do the things in the background that someone in power DELEGATES to others.  You, as the player, are not allowed to do that.  Period.  And your Steward is obviously too damned busy to do it which is why you get nickel and dimed to death constantly.

This is important as CK2, at its heart, is a game done at the margins.  Every single hundredth of a percent of research counts as it builds up over time.  Every single expansion for increased income means that after all the upkeep is removed, you get a net percentage and if you have a vassal in-between then you get a percent of a percent.  Those capital expenditures are not something where you can set up a physical lock box to hold a bit of spare cash and keep a bit of change in it.  That gold amount is always staring you in the face and there is so much that needs to be done that the natural inclination is to spend it and pray.  Then get nickel and dimed into debt.  CK2 is the game that accurately reflects the poverty of the era, true, but offers none of the advantages of tribal, feudal or other systems that allow for delegation of duties and responsibilities with accountability.  Sure your Court Chaplain can be caught selling favors, ditto for those other Council members, but those, strangely enough, aren't the main concern.  Getting people to run the daily affairs, and oversee things that are generally small enough to be handled by someone who isn't the Liege, that should be much of the point of it.  That would mean scaling back the entire economic system to reflect the actual poverty of the era but allows for the systemic advantages that certain types of government and religions allow.

Lets say you are a Catholic Heretic that doesn't recognize the Papal authority, and devolves power down to the local level.  Great!  Yet you will still get Bishops asking if they can increase the tithe or put on an extra one...but that is no longer in the hands of the Liege, is it?  Go ask your parishioners and local priests for it...but you can't say that.  I would actually expect the locals to do up the temples better than what the bishop or Liege could do, though donations would always be accepted, of course.  A decentralized religion means things are handled at the local level for religious affairs: that is the advantage of a heresy and you can stop paying the Pope, as well.  While you do get the latter benefit, true, the former of local control doesn't seem to have made it into the realm of what is and is not passed up to the player for decision-making. This might mean lower revenue from such temples, yes, yet it would have the benefit of the locals investing into it with their own money and labor.

If a religion is decentralized then the point of it is: if you take it up then you figure out the basic tenets on your own and start putting them into practice at the local level.  When outsiders hit the player up for wanting to convert to such a thing, then why isn't the answer: "Sure, go right ahead, I'm not stopping you because I can't stop you and that's the point"?  In many ways it sounds like some precursor of Lutheranism before Luther, and the great heresy is that you will follow Christian doctrines as laid out in the Old and New Testaments, but for that you don't need a head of the religion but locals willing to preach to their neighbors by choice or local assent.  To the Pope that is damned dangerous, of course, but for local concerns the overhead and worries (including conversion of other kingdoms) should disappear as a game mechanic. 

Economically the Liege can kick in some funds to build things he or she considers necessary, but that is, and should be, mostly left up to the locals.  As temples/churches don't have a large amount of troops or tax revenue attached to them, and their size is very limited, their actual utility in warfare is slim.  Marginal, at best, and this is a game at the margins, so if that investment is going to happens locally it is for just a slight increase with some ready cash on hand to spend.  For some of the additions like to the main temple or walls, the revenue would go up, marginally, and the oversight of it would be local (by and large).  By having the locals put money into the temple the result is some small amount of cash to be put into the annual budget that becomes the cash on hand for the player.

Cash on hand if you have it.  New roads, apothecaries, enlarging a harbor, paying for book materials to write a book that scales with the size of the domain (thus its 50gp if you are a Count and north of 300gp if you are an Emperor, more or less, as it scales with your economy so it is a rough ball-park on this).  Then if you need some specialized skills that you can't find via inviting nobles to court, you then have to pay for things like Asking a Holy Man to court, finding a good commander, presenting a debutante...and the cost with those ALSO scale to the size of domain.  And the amount you pay to fabricate a claim on a county also scales to your domain size, so it is cheap at the low end and prohibitively expensive at the high end, yet the job is just the same for your Chancellor.  Greedy buggers the lot of them, huh?  And no paying a pittance to uplift some lowborn who has decent skills you need to your court, either, which was something that was done in the era.

The economic considerations of CK2 are weird, to say the least.  Mods can help in this respect, true, and a few address each point of the above concerns to an extent. The Court Physician recruitment can also scale although it can be damned near free for a few of them, so that isn't as bad...and if you have someone with high enough learning at court you can actually just appoint them to the position as the 'Renowned Physician' trait actually only boosts the learning skill by a couple of points and doesn't give them any, you know, actual skill at what they are doing.  If that trait boosted them to the next rank of skill (and that is in there, somewhere, as at the highest level of learning you can get some pretty good treatments that you won't see with the skill at less than 30), so even with mid-level learning they can be practicing at a higher level of skill.  So, yeah, that girl who is great with the books?  Make her the Court Physician.  At anything over 18 learning skill you won't notice much of a difference between that and the mid-20s which are rare.

In CK2 you must save money.  Period.  And you must spend money to improve the buildings in the kingdom, too.  Plus pay out for the random events that will nickel and dime you to death.  And some Secret Societies start to have any costs with them scale to your domain size, which is weird, as the best tools for an experimental lab should be the same since you are generally getting them through trusted intermediaries at Court or via the society.  But that isn't the case.  Now the technology trees in CK2 are a mess, which is why you'll want a learning or stewardship based Secret Society as the cost of buildings is high, and any little bit your character can do, personally, to gain any advantage to anything related to the military, economics or culture matters.  Choose wisely.  Even Societies that just concentrate on self-improvement and then improvement of close kin or courtiers, can really help (and means you might be able to forego some of that hiring if you can't find someone good to import to Court).  You will be punished for spending, even if it is defensively in response to random events.  And when you need to build a hospital...expect the cost to be astronomical for all the parts inside of it (or its complex but the game doesn't actually go into that until the highest level of building).  And, no, you don't get to appoint someone to run the thing, either.

Disease is a real concern in CK2 and even before the Plague, if you are prospering you'll find that all that trade is making a county vulnerable to diseases and disease spread.  Plus depopulation if it is a really bad or long-lasting epidemic.  Hospitals are purely defensive against such things and can mitigate spread and depopulation.  And that is it, though it is great in concept, and hospitals were relatively rare in those times as they were expensive.  Luckily it has its own slot that you don't have to clear!  And the base building, with nothing in it, is useless, though relatively cheap.  Now a Court Physician can ask if they can oversee the place, but in multiple runs I've had that happen twice.  It does beg the question of why it isn't a position that can be appointed.  And ditto that for the University (if you have the whacking large amounts of cash to build one) and, no, they don't work with each other because...well, that is never explained in the game but is due to game mechanics separating out Economic venues so that there is no way to bonus off of a University AND a Hospital in the same Province.

If memory serves the University at Bologna, back in the middle ages, was also a teaching hospital that was quite well known and people educated there were highly sought after.  These are separate things in CK2, and those sorts of capabilities must be built into the hospital with higher tech...they also don't come as a freebie when upgrading a University from Level 1 to Level 2, and if you thought the original cost money...well save up for a few years for THAT upgrade, you'll need it.  Since investment in one doesn't help the other, the player will get hit separately for getting a hospital high enough where people want to train there.  And hope that a plague doesn't drain your economy dry either through mortality or building hospitals or building universities: choose wisely.  Or that you need to build some structures to get more troops.  Or to improve the economy, like expanding that market to Level 2 after you've built it at Level 1.  And if you don't have enough troops to fight a war then you'll probably need to hire mercenaries, which has an up-front cost and then a monthly cost.  And they can take months to arrive, too!  Heck, its possible to think you need mercenaries, hire them, have the war going on, win the war and then have to cancel the contract even though the mercenaries never showed up and get nothing but loss for it.

Oh, and actually calling up your troops means you pay them more.  And it is expensive, though not as expensive as calling up your fleet (if you have one).  Yeah, if you want to kill your economy, go to war!  Now some groups get raiding, in which the troop cost is put at 10% and the troops can raid and send back goodies if there is a continuous line of supply for them or load up boats with loot if you got those in the sea/river area.  You won't be liked for it, very much, but it isn't a cause to go to war, so there is that.  Raiders are cheap to maintain, effective, and the only thing they can't do is settle in troops after a siege, as that isn't their job.  Luckily that is only for a few Pagan groups and Muslims.  Morally upstanding Christians don't do that, though they will loot a place for petty stuff as any army does that has decent conduct: sticky fingers has always been the rule in warfare, but more civilized people limit it.  You might get someone you can ransom off for some cash, though!  Piddling amounts for lowborn and even up to Counts, but Dukes and beyond can get some nice ransom if they are rich enough or have a Liege willing to pay for their release.  That actually makes a lot of sense for the period!  The low rate of capture of those holding up on the inside after the siege is won, that is strange as a decent siege means all the easy ways of escape are blocked off, but I guess a Baron is willing to forego dignity to being captured and leave via tied together sheets off a relatively unguarded part of the wall.  For those performing the siege, the monthly cost in troop maintenance is high, which is why any technology that can be researched to improve the effectiveness of a siege are paramount.  The shorter the siege, the shorter the drain on the economy.  Now having a slot based system means that the first slot is always the first thing put under siege, then following in order slot by slot.  No going around that well defended castle with few people that can sally out and going to take over that nearby city!  For shame if you think you can do that!  Even Pagans can't do that!  Why?  Game mechanics.

And since all the troops are paid out of the coffers of their liege, well, just what does that mean in the terms of real money?  Yeah, we're back to that since it wasn't established in the first place and game mechanics run contrary to the way the actual world worked in that era.

Outside of a few principalities that were somewhat forward looking, who grades out, drains and etc. an area and then doesn't build on it immediately?  Wouldn't that cost tend to be bundled in with the thing you are building?  It is understood that some places just beg to have something substantial built there, and yet even the best sites still need that care and attention to detail that the creation of a new slot would entail.  Mind you a small city with just a thousand or so people might not start out in the best of places, but as they grow they will improve their surroundings (at least to their technology level, so don't expect those open sewers to disappear any time soon).  If that were explicitly stated in the cost of new buildings, then it would be fine, yet the way it is presented conceptually is that the initial cost of clearing the land to make a slot then makes it open to anything from a castle complex, a temple complex or major city to be built there and the cost of the first few buildings is from the cost of founding the place.  After that?  Hey does that castle need to have a Barracks for Heavy Footmen?  If the answer is 'yes' then be prepared to spend a lot of money for it, and then to have new troops trained up to what the Barracks can hold.  Of course you'll need to improve the walls of that castle...or temple or town to do any expansion.  Walls are cheap!  Even the lowest of buildings, say a town market or castle town, costs more than a good wall.  So much for the open air markets one would expect and, instead, you will get nice buildings for a few wealthy shopkeepers, and that means it is possible to tax them at a higher rate!  That more or less works, if the basics of what the costs actually are were nailed down, yet there isn't even hand-waving for that.

What is overlooked is that some feudal societies actually had agreements between the population and their liege to allow for labor to be used from the local population for a percentage of the year for each person.  Yes you had free labor which, although it didn't involve everyone all the time, was something that would tend to defray cost of construction.  This is a purely regional affair by culture, which the game diligently tracks, so there is no reason not to have implemented it to give either a lower cost or time to construct buildings (or both) for areas that are under those cultures.  While something like slavery is not unknown in the medieval period, it did exist, though usually not at the level of the State (be it County, Duchy, Kingdom or Empire) which would use them to its own purposes.  That sort of thing went out with the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire doesn't reflect the changing values of slaves from objects (property) to subjects, which happened in the time period of the Early Medieval Start in CK2.  Mostly slaves or thralls were household in nature during this era, not part of the economic backbone of a State like in the Bronze Age of Greece or later Roman Empire where slaves started to outnumber freeman.  Labor in CK2 also does not account for labor that can typically be contributed by men-at-arms, who are already being paid for their jobs.  By making a very generalized system of building, CK2 handles the regional, ethnic, cultural and religious differences across the Middle Ages in a way that doesn't lend to specific understanding of locales and having their advantages and disadvantages show up in game play.  Perhaps if a CK3 is ever made, it will delve deeper into these areas.

Another surreal bit is defaulting of inheritance to a kind that was extremely limited in geographic extent and not widely practiced: Gavelkind.  Gavelkind, as opposed to something like Primogeniture, is a system where when the Liege dies the first eligible child gets the highest title, and then the rest are distributed among the rest of the children.  This was generally practiced in a few and select parts of England and Wales, and suited the generally poor households all the way up to modern times.  Outside of a few established Kingdoms and Empires, this is the DEFAULT mode of inheriting in CK2, and the main job of every Liege is to research how to get the hell off of it so that there can be continuity of government between generations.  Primogeniture or Seniority were well established methods for passing down multiple titles so that they would remain in the hands of one person in the family which should allow for continuity at the highest level of government for non-elective systems.  These were the general standards and should be the default ones in CK2, yet they are not as it puts a game structure imperative on the player to quickly move up in power so as to be able to perform more research and then, as quickly as possible, shift to something reasonable before death.

That is more than just surreal, but it is changing the very foundation of historical game play to suit a game mechanic to put a hard and fast limit on players so that they are driven to seek more power to do more research.  Something like Gavelkind might make some sense at the Nomadic or possibly Tribal level of society depicted in the game, but it has very limited historical scope as a feudal method for property inheritance.  Taking something practiced in a few Counties in England and making them the global default is insane and surreal, both.  For all the things done well in CK2, this is the one place it falls short of the goal of putting together a viable depiction of Medieval society at the upper levels of Nobility.  Mods are available to address this, but those are to fix something that shouldn't have been in the game in the first place, outside of those few places that used this as a legal framework for inheriting titles and goods.  For families where there might be few survivors, this makes some sense.  At the level of a Kingdom it is surreal as no one would ever attempt to run a Kingdom with that hanging over their heads.  Assurance of who was in line to inherit was of paramount importance at anything above the level of a County so that there were no questions about it at lower levels of society.

Naval combat does not exist in CK2.  Period.  Piracy is something that impacts cities with Ports for trade, but aren't treated in any real way via game mechanics: suffering Piracy at sea is something you can point fingers at potential candidates, but you can't send anyone out to confirm just who is doing the actual Piracy.  Raiding on land is a main point of the game, so having some Pagan show up to start looting and pillaging is all part of the game and anyone uncivilized enough to do it has game mechanics attached to it.  That sort of raiding cannot be used a Casus Belli against the group sending them, but only gain generalized hostility to the sender for 180 days after last contact.  Vikings can be a real terror force, able to go far up rivers and loot out counties around those rivers if they have sufficient numbers and time.  As this is a form of Personal War, the game restricts what can be done: it isn't possible to declare war against that person, as an example, and put all their holdings at risk.  While rarely done (as real forces from opponents that didn't raid tended to be the main problem), the idea of being able to hunt down an individual and put an end to their ways would be in keeping with the spirit of the eras involved.  Going beyond the plots to kill should be the retribution Casus Belli: your warring ways are at odds with civilized peoples and action will be taken against you and all who aid you in your ways.  That is what happened in history and wars were started over this sort of thing, though minor wars, to be sure.

Yet all of that is the lust for gold that is done in a system that doesn't properly handle the actual mechanics and costs of building anything with its gold based system.  Paying troops is a variable amount by era, and what might be a good pay in one era (say paid in salt, which is the basis of what we call a 'salary') might be too much or too little in another.  Similarly troops in the field had widely varying costs, and that would often include the cost of the supply train necessary to keep those troops fed, clothed and resupplied.  That is handled in a generalized way by the concept of how much supply a County can sustain going through it, though that can be augmented by a separate fort made to help bolster the supply lines.  The actual supply train, itself, requires some troops and were often a target of a shrewd commander who might seek to detach part of the main force to go around the enemy and go after their supply train.  That is not part of the game mechanics for CK2 yet is part of the history all the way up to the modern day.  The reason it isn't implemented is that the game is, at heart, a Grand Strategy RPG that will whitewash a number of smaller tactics to serve the greater component of Strategy over all the tactics.  Thus troop pay and upkeep is generalized to such an extent that morale only gets low if the liege has gone deeply into the red and can't pay those fighting in the field their normal field pay.  That is a large scale concern, and one handled relatively well.

The icing on the gold piece cake is that the game engine cheats, and horribly so.  The personal experience of having a decent sized military and sending them against a smaller organization, usually a Duchy or Petty Kingdom that has lost most of its land, has been one in which the listed forces available and the cash on hand available to that opponent are known before declaring war.  Yet the game engine can and will ignore those to grant an opponent mercenaries that they could not pay the up-front cost to hire, not to speak of actually keep those forces paid in the field.  And this is no small thing when the amount of combat effective troops that can be fielded by levy of home troops is under 1,000 and the cash on hand is under 200gp, yet this organization can pay for mercenaries in the 5,000 combat strength range that would eat up all the cash on hand...and do that with more than one group at the same time.  The Pope usually has huge coffers to fund this sort of thing for himself, so that isn't unexpected.  A Petty King or Duke, who has the exact same problems the player has, does not have the actual ability to suddenly whistle up an entire annual revenue in a few days.  Period.  This is doubly true if they have no external large allies supporting them: there is just no way to get that revenue in fast enough to hire large mercenary groups.  Thus in one day a land holder of 3 to 5 Counties can call up the revenue that even a proper Kingdom 5 times that size couldn't bring in, even in an emergency (unless it cheats, of course).  And then, after that, even when its territory is getting sieged out and looted, the income remains STABLE and doesn't drop.  The ability of in-game AI to handle just what a player can do is lacking, and thus the game engine cheats for the AI NPCs it controls and that means they are not bound by the same rule set as the player is.  In theory it is, yes, and much of the internal game mechanics is the same for the AI and the player, right up to the point where the game cheats, which means there are other game mechanics available to the AI that the player doesn't have available.

This form of cheating is part and parcel of nearly all Grand Strategy type games from multiple companies, and its an expected part of the game class.  The RPG elements, however, add something to it that most other Grand Strategy type games don't handle well or at all.  By having a firm NPC back-engine to determine what happens to each NPC every single day, CK2 transcends most other Grand Strategy games as it puts in more than just flavor of the era, but actual mechanics that have real-world foundations.  The most important of those, indeed the over-riding one, is that Personnel is Policy.  What ever you do for individual from marriage to giving honorary titles to making them a councilor to granting land: all of that is done on a personal basis, and the individuals have a general history and running game mechanics behind them that are then CHANGED by what the player does or does not do.

There are a number of full-blown RPGs that don't handle this well, and rely on pre-scripted stories to deal with events.  To a degree that is true in CK2, yet each and every individual has their own Focus and Ambitions, along with their Stats, Traits and Skills, plus membership in a religion or religions, and Secret Society membership all playing continuously in the background.  While a series of events may be pre-scripted, they each have decision trees to them, and this is as true for the player as for all the NPCs.  When 10s if not 100s of NPCs are each doing their own thing, and can respond to what the PC does but in a manner only known in a general way by the player, the concept of 'immersion' moves to the forefront.  This is not an immersive town, country or 3D landscape, but is, instead, the social and inter-personal immersion that so many RPGs have drifted away from to move towards visual immersion.  The truly surreal part of CK2 is that it has good RPG game mechanics, beyond mere elements, built into the game and an essential part of it.  Those game mechanics MUST work with the general combat, overhead and maintenance AI used to run everything else for the NPCs.  For all the fact the player never gets to see a 3D rendering of anything, the individuals the player works with as NPCs begin to get their own back-story and the more you interact with them (which is slow, given the era) the more you understand them.  Of course much of this is built up by the player, but the foundation for that building is in the game play and RPG mechanics.

CK2, at its heart, is still a Grand Strategy type of game, never doubt it.  The player must have good conceptual understanding of how a hand-waved economy works that had difficulty tying itself back to actual world costs and functions for the era.  The generalization is huge, and the defects are plentiful, but then that is true of nearly every other Grand Strategy game on the market.  By putting in more than RPG elements but having an NPC game mechanics system (all dice rolls in the background done on a daily basis) the actual game, itself, blurs the line between Grand Strategy and concepts of working relationships normally relegated to the RPG world.  While the player may only have some scattered instances of direct interplay with an NPC, their character sheet can be brought up so that it is easy to piece together just what is going on with that individual.  Get to know them via their character sheet and their interactions make sense (unless they are Possessed or a Lunatic, of course, but even those have their own way of doing things).

A good strategy gamer may miss the RPG aspects and just put them to the side and ignore them, by and large, until they get hit with personal matters that have finally forced themselves into the forefront.  At that point the player must move from strategy and move to personnel and policy of how to deal with individuals, far beyond the 'Leader of another Country' deal that most Grand Strategy games offer.  No it is necessary to deal with a spouse, children, who you need with decent skills for jobs necessary for your domain that you want to remain in the family bloodline, and then there are marriages, seeking to arrange long-term superior positions by marrying well and shrewdly, and, of course, paying strict attention to dynastic dynamics.  Not doing so will cost a Grand Strategy player dearly.

Similarly an RPG player may yawn at the lack of instant do something now or fulfill this quest as fast as possible game play, as those aren't available in the Middle Ages.  Interpersonal concerns, particularly where what you do as a player will have profound implications for long-term game play, which means trying to plot out a different methodology that goes far and away from 'shoot this, kill that, reap reward' style RPG games.  By not paying attention to infrastructure, troop disposition, which Vassal is getting powerful and finding a way to deal with it, and then not paying much attention to going to war, n pure RPG gamer may find themselves overwhelmed with the strategic aspects of CK2 that are a MUST in game play.

That is surreal.  Very surreal.

Vast 'open world' games do not have the sort of variability for NPCs that CK2 offers, as they must cater to storylines, quests and pre-set characterization.  For all the grand number of individuals that show up in the typical 'open world' setting, only a handful of them are ones you can interact with and all of those have their own world design and story purposes.  Everyone else is window dressing.  In CK2 the window dressing is removed and the pre-scripted plot is generally removed as well, and what actually happens is put to chance and so many types of events that it is impossible to tell just what will happen, save that it will be setting appropriate for the individuals involved.   This is something that NO RPG will attempt because if it did then the story designers would need to take the high degree of variability into account.  By focusing in on the day-to-day mundane activities of a player the amount of variability for the NPCs is limited in scope.  Yet a couple of months in CK2 demonstrates that even with extremely limited time-scales a lot of events can happen that will change the disposition of individuals across the entire game.  This is a time frame that would include most RPG settings, and some settings are worthy of a year or two of in-game play, which would readily see shifts in CK2 for individuals (births, deaths, marriages, and all the affairs of state including wars).  This is not a 'living world' concept, but rather one with such a high degree of scope for the individuals involved (with limits then put on each individual) that the ability to predict who does what over a given span of time is nearly impossible, yet stories do get told within all of that.

This concept of creating a world-based theme based on the actions of those in charge of governments at multiple levels, along with the lower-tier individuals at the courts of those in charge, is one that typically is outside the scope of a tightly scripted RPG experience.  A compelling story, a narrative, story, plot, characters and all of that are the traditional realm of RPGs as they are the genre for that sort of story telling experience.  A loosely scripted set of stories with generally open-ended game play that would feature multiple ways to go through the story would require a lot of storyboarding, scripting, addition of NPCs and so on based on the older methods of story telling in RPG game mechanics.  A truly 'open world' wouldn't feature a tightly woven narrative with single ending, but would feature a tightly created story for the player to discover as they chose the means and methods to play through their game experience with other goals in mind.  This doesn't mean that the tightly created story is unimportant, far from it, but that story must exist among many others that are on-going in the game, and some of those may have compelling reasons for players to play the game and treat the actual narrative as something to be discovered that will offer meaningful content and change to the character, NPCs, or game world as a whole.  That story may be the one that drives the character at the start of the game, but is quickly moved aside as it becomes apparent that there is no easy way through it: the complexity of the changing cultural and social landscape means that the player cannot expect to find a 'golden path' left for them, although key points of discovery can and should be left for discovery.

In the game play of CK2 there are no assurances that what a player sets out to do will actually be the thing that matters most after game play starts.  Each player gets to determine how certain events and changes in their character and game world effects them, and those choices have short, medium and long-term consequences.  Just choosing who to marry can alter the entire course of the game as marriages can create non-aggression pacts that can be developed into an alliance.  Choose a different spouse from a different family in a different government and the impact of that will change the entire direction of game play, and there is no assurance that the individual you found to marry in a prior game with the exact, same start will be available in a new game.

Within CK2 are narrative events that require work, investigation, PC investment of time and resources, or just personal contacts to help aid in achieving the end of that narrative cycle.  Many of these are repeatable, but with variations that allow for different outcomes.  Some outcomes may be a set-back, in which the goal isn't achieved, and that can have ramifications as well.  The idea that there could be a tightly created but loosely available story in such a setting is par for the course in CK2, which sets it apart from standard RPGs that invest more in individual characters within a given setting and planning a number of paths through the game to guide the player along.  This requires intricate and complex story design, that can be huge in its overall scope.  Many game design companies have decided to remove most of that complexity to fit the console market, thus removing background depth and immersion from RPGs as individual games and as a genre.  What CK2 demonstrates is that such removal of complexity need not be performed if a good game world with multiple game states can be created at the start or as something the PC moves in certain directions during the course of game play.  By not emphasizing the story, and putting it into a string of longer decisions, each with a constrained set of choices based on the PC's stats, skills, and background, the pure number of decisions can be increased but not presented at a single point.  By charting out paths within a narrative tree, the interior and end-points can change game variables and thus alter game play.  Stories may be a bit generic, to be sure, but the sheer variety of them and the circumstances that invoke them means that game play will never be the same twice, even in the exact same starting setting.

What CK2 achieves in its grand strategy RPG concept is something that can and should be emulated by AAA game producers as it allows for a much wider 'open world' game concept and would allow for the insertion of multiple stories into a game that can be developed indefinitely based on the game engine.  One of the most daunting aspects of CK2, as a game, is the amount of new and varied content that has been added as DLCs over the years: it is huge and expensive if bought as a single package.  Yet by creating a compelling game with game play mechanics that remain the same in conception, each of those DLC packages expands on the depth of game play, puts in new decisions for players that have dramatic long-term consequences and, generally, refresh the game periodically with updates to the core game system and mechanics for both the core game and how it uses each of those DLCs.  The CK2 with all of its DLC content today is not the game that was brought out originally, yet the core game mechanics are, essentially, the same though with greater variation and additions to them.  By interacting with their players at a fundamental level as a game design company, Paradox Games remains involved with a core development team that takes input from the player base so as to fix bugs and adjust content while at the same time developing new content and refreshing older content.  This is far more than most RPG game development companies do in the RPG genre in the AAA section of the market, and most AA companies can't afford that sort of involvement due to overhead costs.  Yet to retain an active and vital player base willing to buy new content, it is exactly what such companies must do to retain market share.

The concept of 'games as a service' brings into question: who is the main beneficiary of such 'service'?  Without deep and meaningful interaction with a player base, and acknowledging that bugs need to be fixed while working with players to understand their criticisms of the game and its design, a game company that pushes new content out may find that its 'service' model isn't meeting the player base.  Enticing a few individuals to spend lots of money for such content can be lucrative, but that also means that the function of the game is no longer geared towards interesting game play but towards those few individuals who spend the majority of money on a regular basis for new 'content'.  This is self-defeating in the long-term, though lucrative in the short-term: without wider player interest the compelling reason to play a game for more individuals will die off and it is those individuals who feel ill-served by this service that will leave such a game as its actual play content becomes static but 'features' that a player must pay for become more numerous.  'Features' that don't add fundamentally to a game means that game play becomes static: a few new pieces of loot or a recycled plot story as an 'addition' do not actually add to game play as they do not tinker with the fundamental aspects of such game play.

By restricting the genre but opening up game design within the genre and involving the player base in long-term discussions and encouraging modification to their games, Paradox Games has hit upon a long-term, sustainable formula for multiple game titles.  CK2 is one of the better examples of this, and it has had more 'legs' than many other franchises that feature RPG game mechanics.  While highly abstracted for CK2, the ability to have players run across new events, find different means to address older ones and broaden game play scope all mean that CK2 retains a player base AND adds new game play and features on a regular basis.  Few if any 'games as a service' can sustain game play for as long as CK2 has been around.  It doesn't offer huge monetary rewards or income for the designers or publisher, but it does offer a steady monetary stream, year on year, as new players come into the franchise from discovery of it from other active community members.  This is a goal that many 'games as a service' titles aspire to, but never achieve, thus that 'service' based game will, eventually, get closed down or just die out due to lack of players.  By not making that a primary goal, Paradox Studios achieves it.

That is just surreal.  We could use more of it in the gaming world.

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.