Just released into Early Access with Native Linux support, VEIN could be the next big survival game with a whole lot of features that just look and sound great. It may not be all that impressive graphically compared to some other survival games, with a rather flat-looking style to it, but it seems the list of features and general world interactivity make up for it.
You know the drill when it comes to this though - the world ended, it’s a zombie apocalypse. It’s been done over and over again. Where it actually sounds interesting is everything else. The environment is dynamic and changes with the seasons along with “long-scale” random events. There’s also some intelligent AI they say that can “see, hear, feel, and smell you, and react intelligently to those senses”.
Additionally there’s a lot of character customization, nearly everything is usable in some way down to simple things like knocking on doors and turning on taps. Then you get into the building systems where you can build up a safehouse, you need to go hunting and till the land for crops and there’s even vehicles too. So far, it seems like it has everything to make it quite a hit.
While the “general purpose” AIs are simply shit (and this won’t change for the foreseeable future), specialized AIs for limited purposes have been a staple in gaming for ages.
I wrote a game called “sub hunt” on the TI99/4A (if anyone remembers it…). This was 40+ years ago, and used a kind of AI engine where the sub hunters learned about the players behavior. After a while, one had to restart the game because the hunters could easily predict where you would go…