Battle Royale with Cheese
There’s no denying that the biggest
surprise game from last year was PlayerUnknown’s
Battlegrounds, or PUBG. What
initially looked like yet another boring multiplayer survival game that would
get popular in the Let’s Player community for about a month before disappearing
into obscurity and never actually make it out of Early Access somehow managed
to defy the odds and become one of the biggest indie names to come out of 2017.
It earned Game of the Year nominations, a strong following on both Twitch and
YouTube, and the title of the most-played game on all of Steam. That’s no small
feat.
So it’s no surprise that this is gonna
be the next game the Triple-A publishers are gonna try to rip off!
Everyone’s favourite Overwatch knockoff Paladins announced recently it would be trying to get back in the
public eye doing the only thing it knows how: by ripping off whatever is the
most popular shooter right now. A Battle Royale mode is coming to the game
soon, adding in a massive map 100 players can battle it out in until one is
crowned the champion.
Oh, and the mode is literally called
Battlegrounds because of course it is.
With this announcement game
journalists quickly attached themselves to the idea that more and more games
should include a Battle Royale mode as an extra bonus in addition to the core
deathmatch and team-based multiplayers that have become industry standard. PUBG was a huge success, so the main
developers would be crazy not to ape it, right?
Well, I personally don’t think that’s
exactly the case.
For one thing, PUBG is built entirely around the idea of a Battle Royale mode. It
isn’t a palate cleanser to a more well-designed multiplayer or a singleplayer
campaign. The game is the Battle
Royale. That’s what you pay for, and that’s what you get.
If a developer decides they want to
build an entire game around a Battle Royale-style gamemode to compete with PUBG that’s another story entirely, but
there’s no way anybody can compete with the current crown jewel of the genre if
they treat it as just another disposable side mode. If they don’t put in the
time and effort that PlayerUnknown did to create their big success, they’ll
just come off looking like another game trying to make some easy money by doing
something similar to what a big-name title found success in.
Look at what happened around the time Overwatch came out. There were other
similar hero-based shooters popping up around the time, namely Battleborn and the previously mentioned Paladins. But as neither of them really
had much original content to show that you couldn’t find in the more
recognizable Blizzard game, they were quickly dismissed as games trying to
piggyback off of the current hotshot. “If you liked Overwatch, here’s a game just like it!” they cried, but at the end
of the day the people who liked Overwatch…kept
playing Overwatch. Why take a risk
and give a different game a chance when you had a tried and true multiplayer
game that you knew did the concept right, especially when these alternatives
didn’t seem different enough to warrant giving them a try.
And this is the lesson developers need
to learn before they all jump on the Battle Royale train. To compete with PUBG, one thing is crucial: be more than
PUBG! Don’t just vomit up the same thing
players have already been enjoying for months now except with a different art
style and a few unique weapons. If you do that, everyone’s just gonna look at
you and say “Well, they’re trying to be PUBG.
Doesn’t look like it’s worth playing.” But if you do something new and
different with the concept instead, that might catch the eye of players tired
of the same old, same old of the older game looking for something similar but
with a new twist that makes the concept feel brand new again.
We don’t want to play a game we
already own except with a different name. We want to try something that dares
to be different than the norm, and might turn out even better than the starting
point.
Song of the Week
Nintendogs Bath Time (Vocal Mix) – Super Smash Bros. 4
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