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
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.
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.