two ways to add game play come to mind:

1. SIMCity with tanks. I've now been saying this for 27 years now. and nobody has built it yet. like an rts, but with realistic build times - more simcity - less RTS. Caesar II was the best example.

2. Ages - as in AOE. after x years, new building / technologies become available.

Just reminded that Black&White series might be noticeable.

One of the ways I'm dealing with this is to pay special attention to details. The tree isn't just a tree. It's pine (light and soft) or oak (hard and grainy) or cedar (Boats! Cedar-bark baskets!). And for that, you'll need a character on your team who knows a thing or two about trees. There's also a marked difference between "Discovered: a small portrait!" and "Discovered: Rembrant's portrait of a young woman in pearls, 1632."

And even if it doesn't affect the gameplay much, drawing on the players' associations with these sorts of things can make the experience more immersive.

Or, say that you've found a beautiful grand piano in a ruined concert hall, but how the heck are you going to move it to your base without ruining the piece? And if you manage to save it, who has the skill to play it, or the knowledge to tune it? And there we've sneakily added in several unofficial side quests-- foraging for sheet music and maintenance reference books and skill grinding-- with the reward of having a stirring concert at the end for the town. The stats might be nice, but it also shapes your builder with story it might not have had otherwise.

Now, granted, my game's a post-apocalypse last-humans-on-earth sim/builder 2d thing, which lends itself to this format. The setting also implies that longer you take to forage and explore, the harder it will be to find intact items. So (like most things) it's not universal advice... still, worth a thought or two.

Hi Suliman,

I think the problem really comes down to the goal of survival games.

I think the main goal of any survival games is to, well, survive. In order to survive you will need to manage different resources and dealing with hazzards in an environment etc.

When you set up the basic, no longer need to worry about surviving, you have actually finished the goal and the game is over.

You have found the solution to the puzzle, of course you will feel bored after that.

Games like Don't Starve varies the environmental conditions every time you start a new game to change things around, but that does not change the fact that the game will end.

I don't think there is anything wrong with city-buildings/sims/survival.

Like you said, it is just the nature of it.

You simply cannot make a survival game that forces you to stuggle on surviving constantly.

That is like a puzzle with no solution, it is not a puzzle.

Maybe, instead of making one game that lasts forever, how about making it worth re-playing?

Or maybe, like Minecraft/Terraria/Don't starve etc, survive is only one aspect of the game. Building stuff and exploring dungeon and what not can also be fun.

Simulation games are system games. The challenge and goal of these kind of games is to master the system, to understand
how it work. Once you have mastered it, there's nothing more to learn.

You can try to introduce features from other kind of games. There are story driven games (are you able to write an interesting story), competitive games (multiplayer and some kind of ranking), game mechanism (similiar to system, once you have mastered it you need more challenges) etc.

But this could end in making two games in one and each game part competing with each other.

You can add options to challenge the knowledge of the player:
1. Add some kind of time pressure, so that the player need to execute his knowledge more optimized.
2. Limit certain resources, so that the player is forced to find alternative routes to solve the challenges.
3. Forget knowledge, i.e. like the potion colors in some roguelike. Instead of always using the red potion as healing potion the player need to learn, that after restart it could be the blue or yellow potion.
You can extend this to crafting:. you can only craft obsidian weapons in one game and after restart you can craft only metal weapons, or stone or bone etc.

The trick with open-ended, open-world, and sandbox games is that they by and large rely on emergent narratives from non-linear story lines. That means that despite the efforts of the developers, the story told by the game is made up by the player and exists only in the players mind. Sometimes that can be prolonged by either human storytelling insertions (ten thousand fetch-from-a-cave quests in Skyrim) or random events (another wave of zombies in Rust, a tornado in Sim City) but after a while even that gets as tedious as doing another hundred integrals for your calculus homework.

Games like Minecraft and Factorio succeed because the emergent narrative is forced to be almost entirely in the players mind. They're like an old-fashioned set of Lego (the ones before they cam with assembly instructions for the one single model you you're supposed to build). But eventually even such games come to a "OK, now what's the point" where you stop playing. Maybe after creating a video decoder using in-game technology. Maybe that guy just needed more calculus homework.

My long-term fascination, for over 30 years now, is to create an effective generative storyteller that can alter storylines to meet and alter the emergent narrative in such a way as to continue player interest with compelling plot, location, and character. 30 years ago the technology just wasn't there. Today, well, it's still not there but I see a few flashes of brilliance every now and then. I think maybe in another 30 years, people might just immerse themselves in their own personal interactive entertainment using AI generative storytelling and an artificial or augmented reality human-computer interface. I see social collapse and unethical exploitation for personal profit in that, but I'll be dead so not my problem.

Anyway, I think the only way to give open-ended games extended playability is to have a better storyteller continue to keep the player personally engaged with non-repetitive and appropriately levelled challenges. As if they're playing against a matched human. Real AI, not the fixed human-programmed ruleset currently referred to as AI.

Banished I found quite dull.

Dwarf Fortress conversely, I still play on and off.

DF has much more creativity - you can build skyscrapers or manage a city of militant dwarves (or psychotic ones, or maybe do a settlement full of fish-cleaners and traders). Banished is much more focused...but it has like, no focus. It's a sandbox where I don't feel compelled to be creative, there's no direction. In DF, I feel like there are lots of things to grab my attention - I can focus on gathering valuable resources like gold or platinum to make giant gold-plated graveyards for my soon-to-be-dead dwarves. Or, I can focus on building a mighty dwarf barracks. In banished, I just make a town and it it just eventually flounders with not that much to say about it afterward. When my dwarf settlements inevitably spiral into self-destruction, it always starts with an interesting story, "So some crazy dwarf just had to pull a lever that controls the lava-flow to the forge..." Plus, I can ALWAYS go back to my destroyed city at some point, reclaim those old rooms with new settlers. That adds an interesting element to the game - you can fail, but when you do, you don't have to start over from scratch!

It's hard to compare the two games as they're really different. I would just say in Banished's case, it needs more direction or stuff to do. It's like a skeleton of a game, or at least the initial version that I played was like that.