How important is it that games aren't afraid to reflect real-world politics?

I think it's important, I think that's where all writers draw their experience from POE currency trade , the world where they live. What I think perhaps players object to, and this is just a feeling, I don't know for sure, but I think that when you're a writer, you have a responsibility to serve the characters that you create. It feels that, sometimes, when a character is spouting off about something political in a game, it's not because it's their opinion—it's because it's the opinion of the person writing that character. I think people are sometimes a little too overt about that.

Sometimes when I play games I'm like: Huh, the writer really wanted to say that thing, not necessarily the character in the world and the situation that they're in. If I'm writing a story about refugees coming into a land, I need to tell the story through lore and characters and whatever—but I also try to put myself in the boots of the people who were there first and consider how they would feel.

The conflict [between both sides] then rises naturally from there, from two opposing viewpoints. Neither person or side is necessarily wrong, and I think that nuance is what makes interesting characters. I guess that I kind of understand that players sometimes feel that it's just a bit too overt at times, and that's maybe why they react to it. But I also think it's inescapable that people will write about characters that interest them—and politics and things like that are a part of the world we live in.

What does the future hold for the survival genre?

That's an interesting question. I don't know. I feel like these things are all relevant. The MMO genre was really strong for a while, and then it became sort of fractured, and were broken down into MOBAs, battle royale-style things etc. MMOs at one point tried to do everything at once. We now have games that cater to just PvP or just crafting, these very specialised splinter games that do those small percentages of things very well POE currency buy .

In terms of survival, I think it's going strong and is evolving in different ways. You have things like The Long Dark single-player, you have Ark which is constantly piling on maps and player customisation and more and more monsters and abilities. And then you have Conan Exiles that's very much focused on a core combat building experience, where we're encouraging PvP conflict while trying to make the world feel realistic. It's heading in all different places.