More video games need to include battle royale modes, even if they aren’t the primary focus of the game.
Credit: Respawn
More video games need battle royale modes. I know this will make a lot of people shake their heads and gripe at me, but I’m serious. It’s a great mode and more games need to capitalize on it, in one form or another.
I’m not arguing that more games should emulate exactly what Fortnite or PUBG or Apex Legends are doing. I am saying that battle royale can work very well in numerous types of games, and doesn’t have to be the only mode. In fact, one of the biggest pieces in the puzzle of Fortnite’s success has been Team Rumble and other modes that eschew battle royale mechanics altogether.
Along those same lines, I’d argue that Apex Legends should find a way to create non-battle royale modes as well, giving players something more akin to Call of Duty’s traditional multiplayer. Why not? Have your cake, it eat too.
In any case, I keep finding myself wondering if developers these days are purposefully avoiding battle royale in order to avoid gamer complaints and mockery. For a while there, every new battle royale announcement was greeted with backlash, as though somehow there were so many battle royales out there that the market couldn’t sustain anymore. That’s nonsense. There are a handful of big battle royale games and a handful of indie battle royale games and then . . . not much else.
Games like Black Ops 4 introducing a battle royale mode makes perfect sense. But why not also Borderlands 3? Why not DOOM Eternal? Okay, maybe not those games specifically, but more games in general.
Borderlands 3
Credit: Gearbox
The thing is, we’ve long accepted multiple game modes in shooters. We’re fine with modes like Team Death Match, Domination, Capture The Flag and so forth (or whatever they’re called in the various games they show up in). But for some reason, Battle Royale is seen as a pernicious trend. I still see people who don’t play Fortnite calling for its demise, hoping (for reasons I cannot explain) that it fails. Why? It’s a game many people love. There’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t have to play it!
And if battle royale were merely a mode-within-a-game for more games, you wouldn’t have to play it either. I’m not suggesting all these games adopt giant maps with 100 players, either. Battle Royale can take many shapes. You could have 10-player battle royale on much smaller maps. You could theoretically have 1vs1 battle royale, even. The point is, it’s a mode worth exploring and iterating upon that shouldn’t be discounted just because it grew popular overnight.
Popular isn’t always a bad thing. Often there’s a reason something is so popular in the first place (though this is clearly not always true).
More games should experiment with this mode, and with other new modes as well. For instance, I think Modern Warfare’s upcoming 2vs2 Gunfight mode is absolutely phenomenal. I haven’t had as much fun in a shooter in a long time. I love to see the creativity of a new mode like that, but I also love to see the creativity of iteration. What clever ways could the battle royale concept evolve?
Time will tell.
