As the trend of the hyper-popular battle royale genre continues to grow, we’ve seen many games adopt the mode of multiplayer, if only as an afterthought. Streamer and skilled Fortnite player TSM Myth hopped on the Unpopular Opinion Twitter trend for the battle royale edition and said that “no one gives a f*** about normal shooter battle royales,” adding “counter play and mechanical depth is the future of this genre.” Which got us thinking.
With the crazy success of games like Respawn Entertainment’s recently launched Apex Legends and the maintained cultural dominance of Fortnite, there’s still no end in sight for battle royales as a game type. This is fact. But what is the worth of the genre as games like Battlefield V introduce battle royale modes like Firestorm, rumors swirl about a Borderlands battle royale, and Call of Duty adopts the genre as a mode with Blackout?
All of those aforementioned popular first-person-shooter franchises have built their fan-base on their core, uninterrupted, pvp multiplayer. Now, they are met with the challenge of perpetuating that success, but also not ignoring modern trends, and adapting for an ever-evolving gaming landscape.
The Evolution of Battle Royale
As games like Apex and Fortnite rule the charts with their additions to the common FPS gameplay, Myth definitely has a point in saying that the future isn't in 'basic' shooters. Perhaps the genre’s future rests solely in the advancement of the core mechanics, both engagement and counterplay.
Black Ops 4 was a gigantic victory for Activision as far as sales were concerned, but just a few months removed from its launch, the fervor for Blackout battle royale has all but died off completely. A lot of that drop-off can be boiled down to the fact that they (Treyarc) didn't introduce anything new. They simply took their core CoD game and made it into a battle royale. In the Battlefield front, we look forward to their new battle royale mode Firestorm, but the gaming world has reservations.
Looking back, it’s hard to say how much of Fortnite’s success had to do with the building mechanics. In fact, if you ask most battle royale fans, they will say that the reason they love other BR games more, is the lack of it. Games like Apex Legends developed amazing counterplay mechanics in their legend abilities, and movement tech, giving the battle royale fandom something new and fresh to play. The success of Apex Legends easily translated into one of the best launch months of any free-to-play game ever, let alone within the battle royale genre.
It might seem harsh to read someone as prolific on Twitch as TSM Myth tweet that “no one gives a f***” about those games that aren’t trying to make innovative counterplay mechanics, but there’s also no denying that it has a lot of validity. Hopefully, as we see the gap between the top battle royale games and the less popular titles grow wider, those that innovate in countering mechanics will become the standard.
What do you think? Are 'basic' battle royales the bane of the genre?
