I Don’t Really Like (Current) Battle Royale Games…

Battle Royales are leading the pack in the current video game market; from the mainstays such as Apex Legends, Fortnite & CoD: Warzone, to Final Fantasy VII getting a mobile battle royale out of seemingly nowhere. It has taken over the gaming space by storm and it is not hard to understand why. It is an environment that allows a player to demonstrate their skill against another as everyone starts on the same level but it provides enough unpredictability with random drops, map rotation and other player’s spawn choices own to not only reduce the skill floor for entry but provide a cushion for losses — it is easier to blame the game’s systems than blaming your own skill or worse praising another player. And, for the most part, I like the battle royale formula and what it provides. It’s fast, tense and with how quick it can be to get back into a match, makes it almost encouraging to keep playing — you were so close to victory, trying again is only one click away.
It has been long since I poured hours into the genre and I have now recently grown tired of the current market. I don’t like any of the mainstay titles being supported right now, with my gripes being shared across each of them — that being the current battle royale titles don’t have a balance or synergy between its survival and combat aspects of the game.

As a competitive genre, the combat between those playing against each other is the most important aspect of battle royales. This is the case with any versus game, game mode or even competitive tournament environment. Combat in this context is simply the method in which players directly engage to determine victories and an eventual winner; this includes gun or physical violence like your shooters and fighting games but also the sending of ‘trash pieces’ in puzzle games such as Puyo Puyo and Tetris. Not all competitive gaming has combat, such as competitive speedrunning, but most do.
In a battle royale, combat is important because that is the main way you are going to reduce player count in a match and so your goal is to create an environment that provides engaging and purposeful combat and allows it to occur consistently to pace out the duration of the match. When this is not balanced correctly in a battle royale, it can lead to a title that makes combat too far between making play boring, too frequent making play frustrating and potentially in some cases make it so that participating in combat is not desired for optimal play — completely destroying the flow of a battle royale.

Sometimes, the issues that cause an undesired flow in a battle royale are relatively small in comparison to the impact it makes; one such being simply map scale and traversal options for said map. This has been a hurdle present since the beginnings of DayZ mods, PUBG and H1Z1. As ‘barebones’ style battle royales, their design philosophy and implementation is quite simple: Jump; Grab Loot; Find; Kill; Get More Loot; Be The Last One. Apart from airdrops, red zones and occasionally zombies, there is not much else mechanically available — including in traversal. The maps, especially in PUBG were exceptionally large, and mobility is quite limited — vehicles are present but they are scarce. Making much of the game being down time running from one point to another. With combat itself having a low TTK, the ratio between combat and downtime is drastically skewed towards the downtime making the overall experience feel boring and underwhelming — especially when dying unexpectedly during such a long downtime. These issues with PUBG however are relatively simple fixes. While it is a fine balance to hit, the scale of map size and player count is something that can be directly addressed. Long downtimes can also be executed well in a battle royale environment. Hunt: Showdown’s pace is purposefully slow but additional elements make that downtime tense and its length unpredictable. Environmental threats can make easy work of you if you don’t take your time and things can spiral out of control if you don’t plan accordingly; objectives placed across the map independent of other players means that you also have activities to accomplish during the downtime — there is engagement available that doesn’t fully require the other players.

The issues with flow and engagement in a battle royale get a lot more complicated when the game’s design and scope is a lot larger and a lot more complex — issues with the battle royale can be ingrained into the design itself and when issues are that deep, it becomes very difficult to fix post launch, if even possible without changing the game entirely.

Conflicting design is an unfortunate circumstance when it occurs in games. On paper, or individually, the concepts can seem great but in practice end up being not what was expected — either through poor execution or just simply not working right. A game that is guilty of this is Call of Duty: Warzone. On paper, a CoD battle royale can work pretty well; Esports and game modes like ‘Search and Destroy’ prove that CoD mechanics can work in a slower and more tactical environment. Call of Duty even tackled the genre before with Blackout on Black Ops 4. But while Blackout was just generally lacklustre, Warzone has some fundamental problems due to its design and approach to Battle Royale fundamentals such as loot and map traversal.
The maps for Warzone are very large which can make traversal downtime before an encounter very long, fortunately there are quite a lot of vehicles for you to use in order to navigate the map. Unfortunately this brings about my first issue with the battle royale which is the strength of vehicles in the game; SUVs and Berthas at the time are not only traversal but also a very powerful form of defence and even a strong offensive tool. Throwing a trophy system on top of the SUV protects you from most lethal equipment and bringing a vehicle into a gunfight provides such a strong form of cover which, when combined with CoD’s naturally low TTK, makes it near a confirmed win on an encounter with them. Moving with a vehicle is a requirement in the game, especially considering how vulnerable you can be while moving on foot.

Tactical equipment and activations are available as loot drops across the map, the two strongest being Dead Silence and Heartbeat Sensor. Dead Silence makes your movements completely silent which can completely hide you from other players unless they are actively using a Heartbeat Sensor or UAV, both of which give you a player’s location — a Heartbeat Sensor however provides intel more frequently on players in a closer proximity which is more immediately useful. The presence of the Heartbeat Sensor means that at any point of entering a location, you are already marked and you might not even realise yourself. Heavy reliance on intel additionally creates and emphasises a hide and wait approach to engaging in combat as weight of intel can so heavily skew the outcome of combat. The ‘camping’ slows down how often combat happens and the low TTK makes the ratio frustrating to experience. However there is a way to avoid this combat cycle, unfortunately the result is something that is considerably worse.
Loadouts are available in Warzone, which on paper should be providing yourself with an edge during the course of the match, resulting in an equilibrium of power at the end of the match — the last few players having their desired loadouts ready. The problem comes when the strengths of some perks are so high in comparison that they become a necessity in order to have a chance at winning. The Perk 1 slot is always taken up by Double Time allowing you to move faster for longer, which if you don’t have access to a vehicle, is needed to navigate through the map and to keep up in combat engagements. Perk 3 is a mix-up between Amped and the recent Combat Scout, with the former allowing you to swap between weapons faster and the latter highlighting enemies if you have been able to do damage. While amped directly enhances your ability in combat, Combat Scout provides intel to a degree to be able to hunt down other players even more so without the use of a sensor or UAV — an approximate guess with a flashbang or grenade will force the other player to engage at a stark disadvantage. But the strongest and most skewed perk lies in Perk 2 with Ghost; with the ability to hide yourself from UAVs and Heartbeat Sensors, it is the only sure-fire way to counter them directly meaning that everyone ends up using it (Overkill is also very popular but it is usually a means to setup double primary weapons).

Players that were hiding now have a stronger tool to play with and the players they are hunting have a method to avoid which is what the mid and endgame of Warzone ends up being. With combat being decided by who is spotted first and the reward itself for winning combat being so low since you already have your loadout, it becomes much more viable and optimal to simply not engage in the combat until you have to — completely ruining the flow of combat. Even with additions such as the second life opportunity Gulag, there is no encouragement for combat (Gulag can even be considered worse as you are thrown back in at a distinct disadvantage).

The disproportionately high amount of defensive options combined with the lack of reward for successfully engaging combat in Call of Duty: Warzone creates an environment where delaying combat for as long as possible is optimal, making the structure and pacing of the battle royale inconsistent and results in a frustrating experience that feels unfulfilling even when successful. This is what my problem with the majority of battle royales boils down too; to do well is to actively avoid combat and removing the combat removes the fun for me. The most common response I get to this is a simple one, battle royales aren’t for me; ‘They are supposed to be played slow’, ‘It’s all about surviving and the tension’, ‘It just makes the combat more rewarding’. But I enjoy battle royales, I love the one life aspect, the inherently high stakes that continue to grow throughout the match, I love how fast it is to get into another game if you lose the last one and the aspect of being the best out of everyone else. However, I enjoy intense combat. I want to be able to wipe the competition in fight after fight and you don’t need respawns to make that a reality.
What I want from a battle royale is a game that provides me with an opportunity to consistently take out my competition and reward me for taking the risk, creating a constant cycle of combat and reward while having the ever-looming presence of 1 life growing as I keep engaging with the game. There are plenty of games that provide that experience for me, but there are only two that I play and one of them was recently shut down by its studio — so I am going to talk about The Eliminator, the best battle royale out right now.

The Eliminator is a battle royale game mode added as a free update to Forza Horizon 4 and was available from launch in Forza Horizon 5 and to me is the perfect example of not only translating and accommodating system mechanics but also creating an environment where combat is rewarding, actively encouraged and contributes to the pacing of the match.

The Eliminator is split into stages before a final showdown, but I feel it is easier to consider The Eliminator as 3 separate phases: Drop Hunting, Head-To-Head and then the Final Showdown. Before the Final Showdown, you’ll be constantly rotating between Drop Hunting and Head-to-Head as those are your methods of progressing through the Battle Royale. At the beginning of the royale, everyone starts in the same car (a ’65 Mini in Horizon 4 or a ’63 Volkswagen Beetle) and if you want to get a better car, you are either going to have to find one or take one. When Drop Hunting, cars of various tiers are scattered across the map, with the concentration of drops increasing in main landmarks and as you get closer to the centre of the current circle. As this is happening, the map progresses through stages slowly reducing the size of the map and resetting car drops in different locations and slightly higher tiers. If you want to gain a faster ride, you are going to have to move towards the centre and look for them. As you get closer to the centre, your opponents will also be heading closer to the centre. This is where Head-To-Head comes into play.
See someone driving a car you want? Want to thin out the competition? Just want to be an asshole? Drive up to somebody and honk your horn, this will throw you into a Head-to-Head race, with the finish line always being somewhere towards the centre of the map. Should you win, you get the option of upgrading your car a tier, stealing your opponents car or keeping your current car — even if you don’t upgrade your car you’ve made progress by moving closer towards the centre.

This is what makes The Eliminator so engaging, regardless of what you are doing, everything pushes you towards the centre. With more players being pushed towards the centre, more Head-to-Heads occur which brings faster cars into the field and also pushes said faster cars towards the centre. The formula provides a constant cycle of racing, while integrating the survivalist nature of a battle royale; you still have the initial scavenging for new rides, you still have to decide on what battles you take, you can actively hide off the map by coming to a stop, and you still have to avoid the nature of being caught from behind. But unlike other battle royales, this is all done while pushing everyone to the centre of the map in order to prepare for the Final Showdown — the final race of an Eliminator event where everyone has to make a B-line towards the final chequered flag. The closer you are to the centre of the map, the more advantage you have as you’ll be closer to the finish line. You can be in a tier 9 Lamborghini but 10 kilometres is still 10 kilometres. You needed to have pushed towards the centre, and by inevitability, interacted with other players to stand a chance in the final race.

I want more battle royales like The Eliminator, I want more games to push me to engage my opponents and reward me adequately when I do. I want consistency in my engagements and downtime that is paced to be complementary to my combat. I don’t want more titles that have downtimes that last the majority of the game. At that point, I’m not playing a Battle Royale, I am in a glorified waiting queue to be shot in the back of the head — and that is simply not fun.