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.
Well I did have to spend minutes gathering armor or grabbing the wanted weapon sometimes in Quake II CTF or Quake 3. But yeah at least when you die you just respawn, no reque.
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.
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 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, retopologizing, 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.
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 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.
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.
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 think BRs are fine, I’m just glad that the market has moved away from the BR mania that it was once in. BRs intrinsically need a large player base to succeed and it was exhausting hearing about this “sick new BR” only for it to shut down 6-8 months later
I am curious to see if the BR trend now repeats itself with the extraction genre. I think COD and Battlefield already adapted the mode but I do not know how that went and whether they are still going, but now the first wave of larger standalone “Tarkov-likes” is coming in so maybe there is a new hype forming.
I think extraction shooters are going to be the new “thing” for the future. I enjoyed my time with Tarkov but it was just a tad too hardcore for me. I’m excited to see what Bungie does with the genre when Marathon comes out
What games are you talking about?
Only ones I can think of would be firestorm and that shitty Ubisoft one, but I don’t think those had that much hype tbh
Realm Royale, Battlerite Royale, Ring of Elysium, Islands of Nyne, there’s been a ton that have launched and either lost critical mass or been shut down.
For me it’s more the fact that if you don’t play almost everyday, you get absolutely destroyed by people who do.
EVEN AT LOW RANKSSS
Yep, it’s insane. Good matchmaking still seems to be some form of dark arts.
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 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.
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”.
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
I personally stopped playing any multiplayer games. I don’t know what it started happening, but it feels like everything went from casual fun, to grindy bullshit and competitive sweatfest.
Maybe it’s just me, I put too much pressure on myself, but I know that it wasn’t there before. I used to be able to play without feeling this intense pressure of being good, because I didn’t want to be a burden for my team and didn’t want to be insulted by virulent players.
BR games were the worst for this. The longer you are alive, the more pressure builds up. Things could be going smoothly, you’re not crossing even one enemy, and all of the sudden: it’s just you and your friends, versus another team. You make one wrong move, and it’s over. It’s over, and it’s your fault. I can’t do that. I can’t handle the pressure of being responsible for this. Feeling like I’ve ruined and wasted their time.
I play to have fun. To relax. I was never getting angry. But my friends, they did. They were nice to me, we’re still friends after all, I wouldn’t have tolerated abuse. But I could tell, I wasn’t as good as them, and they hated losing when we were playing games. They would get angry, and the pressure of doing good was getting to me. It stopped being fun, and it didn’t used to be this way. So I stopped.
I only play single player games now. It’s been a really long time since I played online. Although, I sometimes think of going back to Titanfall 2, it is still one the greatest FPS ever made in my opinion, and I just adored it, I was really good at it too.
But yeah. I never get angry and rarely feel pressured now when playing a game and losing. No one is going to insult me, or berate me, and I am not dragging anyone down. If I do get angry, it is because some bullshit is happening. Like the game pulled a Mario Kart on me, and decided that I was going to lose because that’s the way it is I guess.
I feel like you made the right move. It shouldn’t be this way, it shouldn’t make you feel this bad, and if it is, then you should quit. It’s not your fault, it may even not be the game’s fault, it doesn’t have to be anyone’s or anything’s fault. If it’s just better for you, then do it.
I suggest to check out some single player games, there is a lot of them. Lots of variety. :)
Overwatch 2 basically reminded me that there are single player games that you fully pay for one time and that range from as relaxing–intense as you’re in the mood for. Now I’m playing Stardew valley and Slay the spire while I’m watching TV and movies. If I feel like action, I’ll play more Yakuza
Casual multiplayer games still exist, but are pretty rare these days. Stuff like left 4 dead, minecraft survival, and halo minigame maps are all very casual. I would think VR multiplayer games are probably casual too but I never got into it lol
If you hate any social interaction with randoms at all tho, then I would still avoid those probably.
Trackmania has you competing against yourself. It’s great for that competitive aspect without the sweatiness.
That’s just kind of how I ended up being with anything competitive honestly, especially if it’s a huge time sink, which battle royale games tend to be. Even CSGO’s “Danger Zone” mode can take like half an hour with just 18 people.
I’ve found myself missing some of the older shooters I played as a teen like Black Ops II, MW2, Battlefield 3, etc. They’re still “competitive” in a sense, but you’re not playing for nearly as much as you are in Apex Legends or Fortnite. Plus the matches aren’t overly long and you can rejoin the action in seconds depending on the mode. And if you leave a deathmatch, you aren’t really losing a whole lot of progress. Pretty much 5 - 10 minutes worth as opposed to 30 minutes to an hour sometimes.
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.
I’ve never played multiplayer games in my childhood (long story), and the first multiplayer I’ve really tried was PUBG Mobile. I’ve been hooked on it for about three years and made some online friends over it. when EA made Apex Legends available on Linux last year I’ve switched to it and clocked about 600 hours since then. I really enjoy the BR format, and even though I’ve never tried a competitive shooter like Counter Strike or Valorant (fuck their intrusive anticheat by the way), running exactly the same lines on the same map and constantly holding the same angles and hoping to just outreact the opponent by a milisecond doesn’t appeal to me.
