The Battle Royale genre recently went viral in the video game space – Sea of Thieves download. Named after the Japanese film from 2000, the concept behind this genre is rather novel. Players move around a huge map, scavenging for supplies and weapons. The aim of the game is to be the last person standing. Survival is key and players must choose their battles wisely. The play area keeps shrinking, and this ensures that the players are always at the heart of the action. Simply put, it’s the video game equivalent of the Hunger Games series.
This game mode started off as mods for well-established survival games like Minecraft and ARMA 2. Soon, they branched out into full-fledged titles and the gaming community was greeted with titles like DayZ and H1Z1. The sandbox nature of these titles played a major role in their success. The whole map was at the players’ disposal and this paved the way for some unique and creative stints of gaming.
Doing an exhaustive analysis of this genre is close to impossible, as its dynamics are forever varying. Hence, we shall reserve our discussion to two recent titles that took the world by storm – PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, commonly known as PUBG (pronounced pub-jee) and Fortnite.
PUBG rose to fame in 2017, and soon became one of the most widely played games on Steam. Fast forward a few months and Fortnite completely trampled PUBG, beating its active user count. PUBG preserves the survival nature of the game, by dropping the players onto a map with a diverse set of elements. From water bodies to rundown villages, the map is dotted with a variety of dynamic variables. A well balanced arsenal of weapons keeps the game fair for the most part. In comparison, Fortnite has a more cartoonish feel to it. The animations and characters are a lot like the iconic Team Fortress 2, in the sense that they are intentionally made more comic and a lot less life-like. However, the Battle Royale mode is free to play and this is the primary reason for its large fan base. For a free title, the game is surprisingly well-rounded and offers its players a whole lot to choose from. Unlike its competitor, Fortnite adds a ‘build’ feature which lets players build structures on-the-fly.
These structures can be used to get to otherwise inaccessible places or used as a safehouse. Building requires resources and this ties in perfectly with the scavenging concept of the genre. A good part of the map is destructible and resources can be obtained from them. The guns seem to lack a sense of well-roundedness. The explosive weapons are borderline unfair and take away from the boots-on-the-ground feel that PUBG delivers. This is a polarizing opinion, however, and individual mileages may vary.