Unpopular Opinion: Battle Royale Games are Boring

I’ll come right out and say it: Battle royale games —  a genre comprising large-scale, survival-focused free-for-alls — are boring. I get it. Fortnite is huge. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is huge. Major franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield are joining the mix. Yet all of these games are stale, lack compelling worlds and storylines, and often approach mimicry. These games use the same point-and-shoot formula, mapped to slightly different environments. With the exception of Fortnite, which has a building mechanic in addition to the following characteristics, the other titles mentioned have vastly the same formula: high player-count, last player standing wins, and random force of impending doom closing in at timed intervals. They’re copy and paste hype-machines designed to milk players of their money over time. Do they do this with gameplay content? Typically, no. They sell cosmetic character upgrades — and lots of them. Fortnite, for example, opts to sell skins but provides free “content” updates. These new pieces of content come frequently. So frequently, in fact, they often cause bugs, instability, and complete imbalance in the game’s tuning. This includes new weapons, items, and map areas. The items are gimmicky. The weapons seem untested. Map areas mean very little to actual gameplay. For any traditional game, developers consistently pushing buggy content would be frowned upon. For these battle royale games, though, it is overlooked because players are not directly paying for them. Not only is it not a good development practice, it degrades the quality of the game.

BR games combine some of the best aspects of multiplayer gameplay with the worst parts of storytelling technique and lore. The majority of these games have no story to tell the player. They exist in an echochamber where several dozen people parachuting onto an island only to kill each other makes sense. Rarely do they make attempts to contextualize the mode or the game world at all. In Fortnite’s case, they use the mysterious, sparsely placed lore to their advantage by selling new cosmetics with every new, discontinuous, themed season (seriously, a coherent story is nowhere to be found). Of course, it can be fun to squad up and play with some friends in such an open environment. This is what makes most co-op and multiplayer games fun, but it is not what gives them longevity. For that, players need something to invest in. BR games currently have players investing in a virtual closet, and I’m not sure that’s enough to keep them happy and engaged long term. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the core BR game mechanics to understand why longevity could be an issue.

The repetition of dropping in and looting becomes extremely boring over time. Not only does the random placement of the loot frustrate me, but doing the same thing over and over again at the beginning of matches drives me insane. One spends a good few minutes waiting, spawning in, choosing a location, and looting before even thinking about engaging one’s first enemy. The randomness of other players also means one can play an entire 20-plus minute match without seeing an enemy until the final zone. If you do all of this and still take the loss — with no eliminations — it can be an extremely unsatisfying, worthless gameplay experience. Worse yet, the all-or-nothing stakes promotes strategies where some players simply hide until the end of the match. This is a problem, in part, because average players can walk away from an hour-long gaming session feeling like they accomplished nothing.Those same people will be more likely to watch someone skilled play the game on Twitch, YouTube, or Mixer (e.g. Ninja) than continue to play the game themselves. Sure, battle royale is growing now, but what happens when the majority of your player base becomes bored? Large game publishing companies know user attrition all too well. Look at the Call of Duty franchise, for example. Unit sales have been steadily declining for Call of Duty since its heyday in 2011, and Activision, its publisher, has had little success returning the franchise to its former glory.

I’m afraid the same type of user attrition is on the way for BR games, and it may happen sooner than we all think. Without creative new additions to the genre, battle royale will cease to hold the attention of next-generation gamers. The end of the honeymoon phase is fast approaching, and the future of battle royale as a genre relies on the next wave of releases to carry it forward. If the big publishers like Electronic Arts and Activision fail to deliver meaningful, unique experiences this fall, it could very well send BR to an early grave.

—Staff writer Dylan B. Meade can be reached at dylan.meade@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @dylanmeade.