I hate battle royale games. Every time I play them i get anxious and nervous, I cant take it anymore
I have played Apex Legends since it came out and I have about 900h between both steam and origin (mostly played during covid).
Since I stopped playing this rage games I feel much better
Tell me what you think of battle royale games in the comments if you want
I think for me, the main frustration is the way those games are structured. You run around for a few minutes and when you finally have decent equipment, someone shoots you out of nowhere and you get kicked out, have to requeue and start over again.
On the other hand, when I die in Overwatch, Valorant, Counter Strike, Quake, Unreal Tournament (yes, I’m old…) I know that I’ll be back in the action in a few seconds, I didn’t lose much progress and I can still win this.
I could use a resurgence of boomer shooters tbh
Imagine my reaction when they delisted UT 2016 💀 and im not even a boomer bro im 17
They literally stopped developing it to work on Fortnite instead when the battle royale mode started getting popular. Absolutely shameful, especially since they stopped developing what the main Fortnite was supposed to be (Save the World) as well, which a lot of people were looking forward to and paid for
Check out Isonzo. It’s a WWI trench warfare game that is PvP (some games may have bots). But it’s objective based on offensive and defensive. You respawn really quick. It’s not like arena since it’s generally one shot kills and you’re further away but it’s a lot of fun.
Not hating on people who like and enjoy PvP games, but to me it feels like it’s a good way for a developer to make a game that doesn’t actually have that much substance. Lacking content? Nothing to actually do in the game? NPCs are difficult to make interesting to fight? Just have players shoot each other. It’s basically content that creates itself, not to mention (if you have good matchmaking) the difficulty ramps up naturally without you having to write better enemy AI.
I just want to fight stuff alongside other people, rather than potentially making another person’s day just a little worse because I shot them before they shot me, you know? Is that too much to ask?
Dev difficulties are still there and not the same. Don’t understimate netcode, or just simply gun feel, balancing, map design, sound design. Those are very difficult to get right even if you do not have to write a story or code NPCs. Each games have different challenges.
Netcode, gun feel, balancing, map design, sound design, … all things that are present in co-op shooters as well. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with what you’re saying, but I feel like you have misunderstood what I was trying to communicate. (Which might be my fault.)
And yes, there are things that are unique (or more critical) to PvP shooters, but my point was: It’s overall less work, for developers and artists, to just have players fight each other over and over again, than to create content for players to cooperatively enjoy.
You have a point about less content development time. But don’t underestimate the complexity of getting the netcode right and balancing the PVP system.
It’s more like trading one set of problems for another, than it is a cop-out.
Plenty of games that lack substance in any category.
I did want to mention that, but left it out to keep my comment short. Yes, game development is very difficult and complex. Getting anything working out there is a huge accomplishment for everyone involved.
I have a feeling many companies found that the ratio of work (and thus investment) involved compared to the potential profit generated, especially with predatory MTX added to everything nowadays, means it’s pretty much a no-brainer to them to create PvP games rather than co-op ones.
Creating interesting gameplay systems and keeping things fresh for players is (I’d say) undoubtedly more difficult than just plotting players against one another. On top of that, netcode and balancing aren’t non-existent in co-op games.
Just take a look at the cancelled Blizzard MMO project “Titan”, which was partially repurposed to become Overwatch.
Yes now that they have proven gameplay formulas, and engines that work “good enough” (but not really), they can grind out garbage/predatory stuff. Sad to see PVP reaching the common ground of those farming games, and ad-crapware like bejeweled spam clones. I guess my overall point is just that it’s not correct or fair to single out PVP.
Yeah the nice thing about co-op games is that the cost of the extra effort to add co-op to all that probably doesn’t give the garbage producers a good ratio of financial returns like you were saying. So seeing co-op in a game is like a symptom of a good game and a big plus to see on one.
I think your right that’s its a lot easier to monetize a pvp game than a pve or single player game (especially these days when players expect ongoing support even for single player games) but I think your comparison is a bit unfair when it comes to creativity to actually create the game bit.
The battle Royale (and previous trends before it like bomb defusal, team death match etc) are mature game modes with well understood mechanics and limitations. That does indeed make things a lot easier to make. But it’s also a lot easier to push out yet another assassins creed game than to create an interesting single player game. I think creating a novel pvp game is just as difficult as a single player or pve game.
I think triple a games in general suffer from a lack of creativity due to a huge aversion to risk and a misallocation of resources to asset development rather than gameplay mechanics. And unfortunately creating a successful indie multi-player game is insanely hard because of how robust the player vase has to be.
I think creating a novel pvp game is just as difficult as a single player or pve game.
And I’m not one to complain about, say, Escape from Tarkov (though it has its problems) or Hunt: Showdown. But a lot of big Battle Royale games that came after PUBG: Battlegrounds didn’t really have anything new to bring to the table. Heck, Fortnite’s build system came from the co-op game they were originally making, so I don’t want to give them credit either.
The question is, do we really need to be creating another game in the same genre? If it’s just to create more value for shareholders, I’d say there’s better things game developers could be spending their time on. Like, having more free time, and working on passion projects.
I feel it’s less of a cop-out and more of a matter of economy and the current state of video games.
The thing with game development is that the visuals always take the most resources and therefore the most effort (concept art, sculpting, retopology, modeling, texturing, rigging, animating, materials, particles, environment art).
You hit the nail on the head when you say that multiplayer is content that creates itself, and compared to singleplayer games for the same amount of “content/entertainment”, it does require exponentially less work in visuals and just a tiny bit more in engineering. In a singleplayer game, once you beat a level, you’re basically never seeing that map and all the love poured into it ever again. Replayability adds value to the visuals in a game, and what adds more replayability than multiplayer?
And that sort of transitions into the state of video games now, where these multiplayer games allocate all those extra development resources into the maintenance and expansion of the game by adding new seasons and firearms and skins and maps every few months, all to keep their playerbase playing and raking in the microtransaction revenue. It just makes economical sense to focus on the multiplayer.
I AGREE
You need cozy game time. It’s not good to add a lot of stress in the pursuit of entertainment! If it doesn’t bring you joy it’s not worth your time. I’m looking at you, League of Legends.
Agreed. At one point, I just quit all royale-type games, because there was enough stress in my life; especially when I worked on a computer all day. I needed a break from it. The smart move would have been playing an IRL sport of some kind, but I eluded that once again, and instead joined a modded Rust PvE server where I just run around the forest and chase chickens. That worked.
Yeah, online competitive games just feel like I’m sitting an exam nowadays. I can do without the stress.
Also it feels like you spend ages running around in an empty field with nothing happening interspersed with seconds of not that great shooting gameplay
Some people attack this statement saying that “running around in an empty field” also happens in Minecraft and other survival games but I think the great difference is that minecraft is a sandbox game you can enjoy with your time and your pace, taking your time to build something, manage your crops, feeding your animals etc. There’s a little bit of challenge, but its an “emptiness full of stuff you can do”, something you cant in battle royale games since a game ends after a few dozens of mins
I don’t like survival games either. Too much time running around in an empty field.
RPGs, Strategy, tightly made linear shooters, all much more engaging.
I feel the same about PvP in games in general. I just wanna vibe, maybe hang out with friends, and the sweat that comes from going against other people actively detracts from that.
Yeah, these games are fun and novel when you first start, but once you get even a little bit competitive at them they just become a chore. You have to constantly keep up with the meta, and constantly be playing to stay practiced. I guess that must appeal to some people, but the better I get at these games, the less fun I tend to have.
I think the bigger problem is how commital those games are. They all want you to play 24/7 which makes it hard to enjoy other games.
I love competitive games, but I have too many other games I want to play. Im not gonna grind on one when I could of played like 30 games off my list.
BRs are a game type that sounds awesome to me on paper but I never end up actually enjoying. Too much time with nothing happening with it all to just abruptly end. It’s a cool idea I think. Just not for me
I stopped playing any game that makes me rage, because my dogs react as if I’m angry with them - since it’s just me and them in the room, obviously I must be mad with them.
Had this exact problem with my cat, didn’t rage-rage (slamming desk/mouse/keyboard have never been my thing) but I became irritated and she picked up on it. Her reaction was biting my hands, which took me too long to realise that it was a form to get me off the keyboard.
I switched from PC to console/playstation and I’m more chill playing in the couch, it doesn’t get me irritated and it’s just an all around more relaxing experience, the competitive scene especially on PC can be very toxic.
Cat stopped biting me, which is a huge plus also, because that little lovely shit really can bite hard.
I wanted you to know, I checked your username after I read your comment and it made me laugh.
Has your life improved?
It wasn’t ruining my life or anything, my “rage” is just swearing a bit, but they pick up on tone etc. So if I notice a game gets me like that, I just wont play it. It’s not exactly fun when they’re like that anyway.
I like games that indulge my poor impulse control and reward risk-taking and recklessness. Battle Royale games seem to be the exact opposite of this, which I think is why they rub me the wrong way. I don’t want twenty minutes if waiting only to die in ten seconds, I wanna die over and over for twenty minutes and maybe still win the match.
And that is why I fell in love with Overwatch when it was still cool.
whats wrong with it now?
Overwatch 1 was wildly unprofitable. They made overwatch 2 very heavily monetized and it had a rough launch. These are the problems:
- they removed a bunch of quality of life features (that they have been slowly adding back)
- they moved from 6v6 to 5v5, a controversial change
- they made the game ftp, removed loot boxes and made cosmetics very expensive (40 bucks for some skin bundles), there is a battlepass that’s ~10bucks though
- new heros need to be unlocked with a long grind, waiting a season and doing some easier challenges or by buying the battle pass.in general there’s a lot of focus on the battle pass.
- they announced an ambitious pve gamemode, then scrapped the most anticipated part, (the community and media generally misinterpreted this as a full cancelation of the pve mode)
- in an effort to address some of the problems with the old game (very stun heavy, very shield heavy) they reworked many of the heros in ways that some felt removed their identity.
- the matchmaker is noticeably worse leading to unfair games (it has been steadily improving). Personally I think this is the result of a large influx of new and returning players combined with what is actually a very hard game to balance matchmaking around.
- a lot of the public faces of the game left including the head designer (rip Pappas jeff) and the head writer.
Personally, I think the game is in a very enjoyable state so long as you don’t want or care about cosmetics. Not as good as when the game was at its peak in 2016 but a lot better than the tail end of overwatch 1.
Personally I can’t stand the gearing up phase of BR. So boring to have to find weapons every time only to get taken out by some guy more skilled than you
I don’t understand why br games always focus on being fast, that’s exactly the opposite of what I would want out of that experience. If I want a fast action game I can play any team death match, a br game is something that I want to get invested into my run to raise the stakes for the end.
In my mind, it’s because the game developers are catering to the “short attention span” gamers, which I think is a pretty large chunk. They want to get to “playing” fast and want that instant gratification.
In Apex Legends, there are hotspots where half the lobby drops, and you either are the one team out of four or five that comes out alive, or you die pretty immediately and have to queue up for the next game. It’s just a different style of playing, which I don’t fully understand.
But then again, I also don’t want to drop in the middle of nowhere and loot for 20 minutes. I want moderate-paced action; an initial fight with one or two teams, then slowly rotate around the map picking intelligent fights where we can.
I haven’t played any game with PvP in like a decade. I think WoW turned me off from them.
Same man. I realized at some point that I wasn’t having fun playing pvp. I was stressed and when I’d stop playing I’d be in a bad mood even if I had been winning/playing well. I rarely play multiplayer games at all now, single player is my lane and I’m happy to stay in it. I’ll venture out for some coop sometimes but mostly I’m good flying solo.
I’ve also never liked BR games. Too often it felt like you run around for minutes, looting stuff and nothing happens.
Then you see somebody and kill them without them noticing you. Or… you get killed the exact same way.
Or when playing with friends. Like Apex, you get into fights with other teams, which is cool, but then third party comes in and owns you from behind.
Then it’s over and you’ve to do everything all over again, running around looting etc.
Or you decide to drop in places where many players drop too. Then you have stupid fist fights or pistole fights. If unlucky, queue again and do it all over again.
This is more annoying than anything else. I prefer joining a fair 5v5 fight on a map where I respawn and keep going. Or real TDM/DM.
I think BR games have too much of a luck factor attached to it compared to oldschool real FPS games like CS, UT, Quake and all that. And I think that exactly is rage inducing.
I completely agree with you. That’s why I never managed to stick to BR games :/ Whereas with other genres of shooter games, I have no issue with. It’s just sad for me to see a trend of shooter becoming more “Battle Royal-ee” (which from a business standpoint makes sense), because it’s simply less games to play. Hopefully, there’s still a lot out there !
Or when playing with friends. Like Apex, you get into fights with other teams, which is cool, but then thrid party comes in and owns you from behind.
THAT IS THE ISSUE! The fact that every time you die you loose all your progress. On the old call of duties, games lasted only a few minutes as well, but you didn’t lose your progress and your loadout after every lost fight and you could get back to action after a few seconds
I completely agree, but there is a way to mitigate this. BRs are most fun imo when you have to constantly keep moving and fight while you move. This isn’t a very good winning strategy but it is fun. I try to land in a moderately hot area, ideally with 3ish teams in the area then I keep near the circles edge and run with the circle as much as I can. This leads to some very cool dynamic fights where multiple teams are fighting at once while also trying to fall back run away entirely and also keep up with the looting. It can be super fun when it happens, but even when I try to force it it only happens every 5 games or so at best. It has very unique moments like sacrificing yourself so your teammates can run away and live or trying to carry a fallen teammate while dodging shooting only to be saved by a third party raid. When it’s good it’s very good, problem is all the BRs I have played aren’t good most of the time.
I tried every BR out there, even those survival games before PUBG, like DayZ. It is just not my definition of fun or competetive shooter. Too much luck factors that determine if I win or not. I am a very competetive player, so I want to win, its in my nature, I’m coming from UT/Quake times 20+ years ago. I don’t know how to casually play FPS games. (which BR games are for, casual FPS for those who suck at it but can have some positive experiences with it)
“This isn’t a very good winning strategy but it is fun.”
This is not how it works for me personally. I want to win and not play a genre of FPS in a weird way just to have fun and not circumvent any luck factors by playing a weird style and lower my chances of winning just to have “fun”. Which is also a different definition for every individual player.
But I appreciate your “guide” to having fun in BR games though.
Yeah, that’s why prefer to avoid PvP games. I’m not good, tbf, and the stress I’m feeling is just too much to handle - my real life is stressful enough, thank you very much…
For example, I would love to experience Sea of Thieves on my own, finding some treasures, fighting skeletons or the Kraken. But the PvP aspect is killing it for me. I’m not entitled to anything, of course. Plenty of people wouldn’t enjoy a pure PvE Sea of Thieves, but as far as I’m concerned, that kind of game would bring me back for sure…I play pretty much everything. Some of my friends rage quit stuff when Im still 100% calm.
When it comes to BRs specifically, they can be very frustrating. Your winrate is inevitably low, due to there only being “one” winner per match, still me and my friends enjoy both Apex and Hunt: Showdown.
In both cases we started having a lot more fun when we started taking the games much less seriously, and not caring about whether the game told us we won.
In Apex, instead of wins, we’d count squad wipes. We began playing much more aggressively, not caring as much about our gear, and going TOWARDS action instead of away from it. This led to less time “wasted” meaning if we died, we did so fast and early, and so we’d get to the next game faster. If we won, we’d score gear off the players we just defeated.
Similarly, in Hunt we’d head towards the first firefight we could hear, and either get kills or get killed. Pretty much always playing free hunters with cheap loadouts we wouldn’t care about losing.
And we never, ever, even considered caring about or grinding rank.
I play to maximize fun, not progress. I min/max for enjoyment, not stats. It’s one of the reasons I have chat entirely disabled in Overwatch, voice and text, because I don’t wanna hear it if someone is screaming at me over my pick. I don’t care. I here to have a good time.
I find that extraction shooters (especially dmz) really fill the gap perfectly.
You get the rush from extracting, you get to kill stuff, regardless of your skill level, but there is still super intense pvp.
Love it
This is the way. I play COD Mobile, mostly BR and there’s some areas on both BR maps where you know a lot of people is going to land so there’s where I go all the time. If I die, ok, just repeat.
Also, pretty cool you found a group of like minded people who don’t focus on the score but on the fun.
IKR. So often its “be at rank blank, or I wont play with you”.
A thing I hate about multiplayer games in general is that a games only lasts from 5 mins to about an hour (in general) and after that game you have to start another game, than another one, and then another one to fucking insanity. I don’t understand it anymore, I’m not having fun just shooting at people knowing I’m probably going to die in 10seconds, loosing all my progress etc
I get that. When we stopped trying to survive, dying stopped annoying us, at least.
How do you feel about dm shooters? I regularly play the other modes in Apex, and I really miss it now that Arenas is gone.
I also immensely enjoy Titanfall 2. I even started !titanfall@sopuli.xyz. Especially on the northstar client, you can decide how sweaty you want your session to be by which server you join. You can go hard as hell against other movement gods, or play weak loadouts and just turn your brain off.
Most competitive games stresses me out. I have probably 1k hours in WoT and WoWS. I know I should be enjoying the small moments and not worry about winning as much, but I just can’t do it.
As much as i love driving my tanks, I couldn’t handle the wot gameplay. I just realised I get stressed instead of satisfied. Switched to PvE games, much better.
I played WoT starting in closed Beta and was really into it for quite a few years of my life, and then I finally realized that like… I hated playing it and it made me angry more often than it made me happy. It’s so so so much grinding out tiny amounts of xp in order to even make a tank feel fun to play, knowing that you’re probably going to be a hindrance to your team for the next 50 games until you unlock a better gun, or whatever module. Plus all the times you just get shot by enemies who aren’t spotted and die without firing a shot. I’ve gone back and played it again a few times since I stopped and I mostly stick to tier 5 and below, or just play vehicles I’ve already upgraded and it can be fun, but I’ll never grind for a tier 10 again.
