Survived By is an MMO where dying makes your next character stronger

The award for most descriptors for a game at PAX West might be Survived By: it's a free-to-play indie open world bullet-hell MMO with instanced dungeons... oh, and it's got permadeath to boot. In the video above, Steven talks with producer Ryan Jackson about Survived By, which is being developed and published by Digital Extremes and Human Head Studios. 

Death isn't quite the end in this MMO, however. As the title indicates, when you expire you pass something important on to your next of kin. "When they die," Jackson explains, "the things that they've accomplished, the challenges they've completed, those will turn into cards and points that they can then spend to make the next character more powerful."

While you're running around trying not to die, you get automatically grouped with other players who wander close enough to you, and share XP and loot with them. There are micotransactions in this free-to-play MMO, but Jackson says everything you can spend real money on can be earned in-game as well.

Watch the full interview above, a trailer below, and follow the rest of our coverage of PAX West 2017 right here.

Steven Messner

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.