In true YouTuber fashion, I have to begin this post with “Never did I think I would have to make this blog post.”
It’s no secret that over my career as a blogger and Twitch Streamer I’ve played hundreds of games and have truly seen the best and worst video games have to offer, but I think Whiteout Survival takes the cake.
To me, it’s tremendously ironic and somewhat hilarious that just over a month ago I wrote a personal post about how I struggle to quit video games due to addictive tendencies in tandem with my ADHD and then I ended up downloading another game that had similar flaws. Admittedly, I had a strong feeling that Whiteout Survival would be problematic for me and I only picked it up because my computer was broken; but I didn’t know it would be as bad as it was.
So let’s chat about why I feel this way.
I have been playing Whiteout Survival for 27 days exactly. I went in intending to be a fully Free-to-Play player, which I admit is completely possible, but even if you spend money on this game it is quite a time investment. Over my time playing it, I did spend money on two packs:
The construction pack, which allows you to build two buildings at once and the VIP pack because there was a discount and I was curious whether or not having VIP would make a massive difference or not. *cough* yes, yes… education reasons.
While I don’t regret buying these two packs in particular, I do regret spending money on a game that was going to become as mentally draining as it was.
You see, Whiteout Survival itself is a pretty fun game. It’s predominantly a collection game, allowing players to collect shards to upgrade Heros and engage in PVP combat. Quite frankly, to consume the game you don’t even need to engage in the PVP and you don’t even need to be a high level. It’s the sheer fact that this game has way too many timed mechanics and events to make it “casual.”
Let’s break this down into points:
YOU MUST ALWAYS BE LOGGED IN
Listen, I’m not a stranger to dailies. I predominantly play games with dailies like FFXIV, but when you miss an FFXIV daily you’re not penalized and it’s not the end of the world. Whiteout Survival, on the other hand, is quite different.
There are a ridiculous amount of dailies to complete and they are spread throughout the day. While your Missions can be done all at once, there are other things you have to account for, such as:
- Every 8-hours you get loot from Expeditions and these must be collected before they cap
- Every 5-minute to 2 hours you get free speed-ups if you’re logged in and there is no actual pattern to this
- Every 6-hours you can donate to your alliance to research upgrades to boost everyone
- You have an island you must take care of which collects you more resources, however, the containers also have resource limits that must be collected before they are full.
- Alliance Members will call for rallies that you will want to participate in for loot that upgrades your heroes. While you can “auto-join” them, a higher member of the alliance can kick you out of these queues to either take your slot meaning you will want to be logged in to manually place your crew in to maximize your gains.
- There is a daily PVP arena which is the only way to get specific resources.
Do I even need to go on?
While yes, you can choose to ignore all of these and log in once a day, this puts you back A LOOOOOOOOOOOOOT because all loot is RNG and you will want to maximize your efforts if you want to do anything.
Oh! I haven’t even mentioned yet… depending on your Alliance you may be kicked out for being logged out for more than a day. In more serious alliances being logged out for more than 8 hours deems a kick, meaning that you will need to log in before you sleep and as soon as you wake up; worst part is… I can’t blame them.
This game heavily relies on you helping each other out. Whether it’s just reducing the amount of time it takes for team members’ buildings to be constructed, donating to your Alliance’s Tech or participating in rallies… you’re letting your team down by not being glued to your phone.
I created my alliance which made it to the top 11, with my character being in the top 100 in power, but I started to realize last week this wouldn’t be enough. I’ll cover why shortly.
TOO MANY EVENTS
When I first started the game there was a maximum of 3 events running at once. These were tied to special mobs being on the field for unique heroes, resource-spending events and minimal PvP combat events. Today when I logged in, 9 events were running at the same time. Though many could be combined, there are days where all three must be done on the same day, but each event requires individual attention, meaning that you would have to be logged in for at least 1-3 hours to get the events done and make sure that the majority of your alliance members could participate.
While yes, I had the luxury of being the person to set up the times for these events, I quickly became exhausted with how much I needed to be logged into the game and often had to tell people I was gaming with that “I need to take a break from FFXIV to go to war.” It wasn’t much of a problem at first, since many of the events simply required you to click on rallies every 5 minutes, but the more intensive events lasted 30 minutes to an hour and required you to always be on your toes. Bro, it’s a lot for a mobile game.
The thing is, these events are the only way to get resources to upgrade things like Chief Gear or unique Hero Gear/Weapons and so if you missed one, you were stuck where you were for at least a week. Not to mention, you can only get a finite number of these resources each time the events came around so the projected future wasn’t looking too good.
Again, I didn’t care about being the best and I wasn’t very competitive, but if an event only came around every week or two… you had to make the most out of it that you could and here’s why.
THE SERVER GETS MORE DIFFICULT AS TIME PROGRESSES
I was extremely happy to see that when you joined the game you weren’t thrown into a world that was already at the end game and you were essentially introduced to a fresh start server that didn’t have the new generation Heroes. But, with that being said, every 2-3 days the difficulty would significantly increase in the world.
So, let’s say the first mob only requires 1 Million damage to defeat, in three days the new mob requires 5 Million, then 37 Million, then 100 Million. While yes you can continue killing the lower tier-mobs, the reality is that the resources you get from the higher tier mobs are significantly better and without your whole alliance improving you are unable to do anything. So, here’s me, sitting at 12 Million Damage, but the average alliance member is sitting at 4 Million. We were never able to catch up to the 37 Million Damage and tomorrow the 100 Million Damage mob was coming out… So were we just capped? Pretty much.
I had the impulse to switch alliances and just join the most powerful one since I was well over the range of the power they required to join, but loyalty stopped me. Not only that, but my gut also told me “if you’re spending this much time in-game in your semi-casual alliance that you run, think of how much more time you’re going to be spending in-game in a very serious alliance filled with whales.”
Not to mention, our world chat was filled with people complaining that they had been kicked out of the highest alliance because they didn’t spend enough money or missed one event… listen, it didn’t sound good. Funny enough, I think we had one of the most chill top alliances from everything I’ve read on reddit, since they seem to be a lot more anal than ours was.
But that’s not the point of the section, the point is… you’re going to have to hustle if you want to do anything at all.
YOU SPEND WAY TOO MUCH TIME IN THE GAME
Again, I’m not a stranger to spending hours playing video games. But it was getting to the point where I would wake up and sink 3-hours in-game immediately and then continue to play throughout the day. Though that would be acceptable if this was my “main game” and I would do that for FFXIV, the reality is that 3-hours in Whiteout Survival doesn’t give you many resources and doesn’t advance you very much. So, is it worth it? I’d say no.
Quite frankly, I’m concerned about what the late game is going to look like. My server didn’t even complete season 1 and I was already feeling the pressure. Not to forget, I hunted all over Reddit to see what people’s opinions were and kept reading story after story about how people had quit after spending 15,000 USD on the game. Yes, 15,000… I don’t think that I’ve ever spent that much money in all of my gaming lifetime. That wasn’t even the highest amount I was able to find, but the median of most of the “I quit after spending a lot of money” stories.
Now, I’m not going to judge you for whaling or dumping money into a game, but if you are quitting a game after whaling that much… there’s a problem.
I kept telling my alliance members, that I wish there was an available mod for the game that gave you a private server so you could spend indefinitely because the game itself is a massive dopamine hit, but the ridiculousness of always needing to be online was getting to me.
CONCLUSION
It’s funny because as much as I enjoyed the game, I cannot recommend it. I don’t think I’ve ever been in that position before… There’s usually something so fatally flawed in a game that doesn’t make it enjoyable which tends to be why I quit it, but the only flaw is “the game is made too well and either needs you to be hyper-addicted or spend all of your money in it.”
As I said, you can enjoy being a low-level player in the game, but you’re really not going to be able to do much and it will become pretty stale fast. Progression is hyper-slow if you don’t put your effort in and even when you do it’s very slow. And while you can continue growing it won’t feel worth it, or at least it didn’t for me.
I’m sure there’s so much more I can say, but I’m even exhausted writing this post and thinking about the game. I’ll probably update this post in the future, but for now, I’m curious if any of you have played the game and what your opinions are.
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