A Defense of the Battle Royale
It feels like it’s very easy to complain about Battle Royales. Yes, do we really need a Tetris one? I see the frustration and share in some of it. The games industry has rarely been as fad-driven as now. I don’t say that in a pejorative way, necessarily, but the amount of heat given off by the eye of Sauron (in this metaphor the Games Media) seems to only have warmed a handful of choice buzzwords in recent years — off the top of my head, Roguelikes, Soulslikes, Metroidvana, most of which I have played some of the seminal entries and enjoyed a lot. These games seem to hold a pop appeal well above the likes of arena shooters, most of which have slumped spectacularly, and while I’m not placing any of the blame on audiences, per se, but these dominate the lower-surface areas of the gaming iceberg. But battle royale is right there at the top, and it’s because of Fortnite.
That’s understandable, because it seems to have managed to capture the pokemon cards-esque zeitgeist for kids in a way that only comes along through some kind of lunar alignment or ritual sacrifice every now and then. But there’s something in the battle royale format, and other than Playerunknown: Battlegrounds, I don’t necessarily feel that I had that many experiences with the BR genre up until that game released.
So it’s understandable that the slightly more jaded gaming fans around the world are frustrated with this tendency for bigger studios to skew towards an easily monetisable battle royale, but monetisable is only one half of a billion dollar formula. There’s absolute magic at play in Battle Royales, and it’s players, and almost exclusively players.
I’m an online multiplayer fan first, and a single player fan second, which I should have probably said up top so you didn’t waste a minute reading an opinion from a multiplayer gamer. Nonetheless I’ve always been drawn to emergent type games- systemic games, procedurally generated games, games with adaptive methods of story delivery or RPGs that offer a more than superficial form of roleplaying. But I’m equally frustrated with the huge open world RPG and the limits they accidentally hit you with. All games have limits, sure, and it’s usually a lot of work to delineate the gameplay from its limits in these kinds of games, but it helps to have rules that you understand, like, your weapon will break the red rocks, type of thing. But increasingly in open-world games a veneer of doing anything obfuscates a lot of the things you can’t do. And then, in those cases I jar extremely hard with the game, and it begins to dominate my thinking while I play the game. It’s a minor nitpick but I ultimately prefer games that are more consistent or limiting in their scope of possibility.
But when you introduce players to the formula, something crazy happens in my mind and body that can not be replicated. I am truly sorry to my neighbours if they are reading this, because I yelp and shout an awful lot while playing multiplayer games. I bellow lamenting a lost game, or yell out in fright as another player appears closer to my player character than I thought even possible. It’s my most toxic trait for sure. But the emergent stories that come from multiplayer games have made more memorable stories than any single player game I’ve ever played. I can’t think of a single set piece from a game I would re-tell in excitement while reminiscing about a game, but I could go back and talk about my tales of valor and cowardice on Left 4 Dead any time it’s brought up. (Note: there are three friends with whom I can no longer mention L4D.)
Battle Royales, if you’ve made it this far without knowing exactly what they are, typically a last man standing format with a player count of between 60 and 100, which is uncommon in most other games. Typically, one would parachute onto a fictional and remote island and scavenge a gun or two, managing a small amount of resources, in a team of up to four, while a metaphysical circle of death closes in around you, compressing the play space at random until there is only one squad left.
What makes these games special for me is the complete unpredictability of it all. There is no AI scripting mechanic that can adequately match the cat-and-mouse of a battle royale game. There are no action set pieces in which a lone player manages to recover their own team mates against all odds to win the game or take the objective. And this phenomenon strikes to the heart of the multiplayer game, that players can create a narrative, or the unexpected actions of others can form a real sense of jeopardy.
I’ve often said that I feel like Call of Duty: Warzone is not too far from a horror game, with what feels like one hundred trained killers on my scent for the duration of a 2-to-15 minute game. When multiplayer games ask you to anticipate the actions of others they are asking a lot of you. AI enemies are predictable, often infallibly, and many game designers cap the power of these enemies in some way or another — often with easily avoided attacks or a forgiving amount of damage taken — but these rules do not apply to the player and for the most part every single player in your game is trying with all their might to win. And the game is over, completely, when you die. Like the roguelike, where permadeath is an equally punishing and rewarding for players, it forces a kind of self-preservation and off-the-cuff decision making to protect your run in the game that is hard to replicate elsewhere.
Again, I share the sentiment that not every game needs a battle royale mode, but we deserve, and probably need, plenty to get the gaming industry where we need to go. BRs are never hamstrung by their design limitations: Warzone functions exactly the same as a Call of Duty game, where all the inherent understanding of the franchise’s mechanics and internal rules is nearly in the drinking water. There is more possibility and wonder in a battle royale in spite of these limitations, versus, say, the obnoxiously linear and limiting story missions in a supposedly infinite world in Red Dead Redemption 2. While there is, and always will be, appetite for these immersive storytelling worlds, I don’t believe for a second that I could tell anyone something I’ve done in a GTA game or Skyrim or No Man’s Sky that someone else hasn’t already experienced for themselves. But I’ve never seen anyone do this.
