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
I am still saltier than salt over that decision
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 requeue.
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.
Yes now that they have proven gameplay formulas, and engines that work “good enough” (but not really), they can grind out garbage/predatory stuff. Sad to see PVP reaching the common ground of those farming games, and ad-crapware like bejeweled spam clones. I guess my overall point is just that it’s not correct or fair to single out PVP.
Yeah the nice thing about co-op games is that the cost of the extra effort to add co-op to all that probably doesn’t give the garbage producers a good ratio of financial returns like you were saying. So seeing co-op in a game is like a symptom of a good game and a big plus to see on one.
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 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.
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.
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.
I don’t understand why br games always focus on being fast, that’s exactly the opposite of what I would want out of that experience. If I want a fast action game I can play any team death match, a br game is something that I want to get invested into my run to raise the stakes for the end.
In my mind, it’s because the game developers are catering to the “short attention span” gamers, which I think is a pretty large chunk. They want to get to “playing” fast and want that instant gratification.
In Apex Legends, there are hotspots where half the lobby drops, and you either are the one team out of four or five that comes out alive, or you die pretty immediately and have to queue up for the next game. It’s just a different style of playing, which I don’t fully understand.
But then again, I also don’t want to drop in the middle of nowhere and loot for 20 minutes. I want moderate-paced action; an initial fight with one or two teams, then slowly rotate around the map picking intelligent fights where we can.
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 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.
Really enjoyed RoE
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 out 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 wed 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 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
A thing I hate about multiplayer games in general is that a games only lasts from 5 mins to about an hour (in general) and after that game you have to start another game, than another one, and then another one to fucking insanity. I don’t understand it anymore, I’m not having fun just shooting at people knowing I’m probably going to die in 10seconds, loosing all my progress etc
I get that. When we stopped trying to survive, dying stopped annoying us, at least.
How do you feel about dm shooters? I regularly play the other modes in Apex, and I really miss it now that Arenas is gone.
I also immensely enjoy Titanfall 2. I even started [email protected]. Especially on the northstar client, you can decide how sweaty you want your session to be by which server you join. You can go hard as hell against other movement gods, or play weak loadouts and just turn your brain off.
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’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.
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 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 !
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 feel like as I get older, I prefer action games that reward strategic placement and high level decisions, rather than the precise millisecond actions.
Things like bunny hopping/sliding in Apex, lean spamming in R6S, etc, tend to make most shooters unappealing to me. Even a game like Deceive Inc has the general idea of stealthy strategy, but in the end all that matters is landing headshots.
Theoretically, this would mean I’d like “realistic” squad warfare FPSes, but those aren’t really aimed for fun. Mostly I’d like an arcadey shooter with movement abilities, but one that has you make decisions between offense, movement, defense; not spam multiple at once.
You could look into ‘Hunt Showdown’ it’s a slower pace br where the main objective is to track and hunt a monster on the map. Other teams (or solo players) are all tracking the same monster. There are times where you’re tracking the monster and end up having to fight a team instead. It’s a game that mixes PVE and PvP elements quite well.
The game focuses on weapons of different caliber bullets, bullet drop, awareness of sounds/audio queues, and bullets actually pack a punch. You’re not a bullet sponge.
I have awareness as that one, but same issue as Insurgency as I mentioned; people who try to engage with the enemies will give away their position to the incredibly idle players, who then have a strong surprise advantage since the swamp has so many places to hide.
It doesn’t help that I’ve heard the developers have a somewhat toxic relationship with their playerbase.
600ish hours in Hunt at this point, and while you can give away your position to the idle players, that only matters at the top end of the Matchmaking system where the “bush-wookies” lie. With the self-revive for solos trait that got added, it helped even the playing field a lot. Previously getting hit by a sniper was a game-over for solos while for a duo/trio it was the start of an encounter, with your teammates able to revive you after they kill or chase the sniper off. With self-revive you have a chance of popping up when they aren’t watching, or when they are pushing to your body from their perch, and either fighting or retreating.
Also I wouldn’t say the developers have a toxic relationship with the player base at all. They are constantly making fun changes to the game and adding in new features to change things up. They also test out new features during temporary events and see how people like them before implementing the into the game wholesale. And this is done via looking at gameplay statistics, not just listening to the very vocal subset of people who hate any change to the game.
I kinda lost all interest in csgo when I realized that my ping had more to do with my success than my skill. And it wasnt like my ping was ever crazy high either. I got to smfc (2nd highest rank) when my ping was 20 and fell down to DMG (3 ranks down) literally immediately after my ping went up to 50 from a move.
I’d like to recommend Insurgency Sandstorm for you, as it sits right in the middle of CoD-like shooters and tactical, milsim shooters… but I have myself soured out of it a while ago due to how it’s handled by the devs that remained. I did have a fun time with Arma 3, but that required a group to make operations with, and 300GB of disk space for mods. Other kinds of action shooter games that could work are slower paced, vehicle or mech based games, but right now I can’t think of a single one that is well maintained and populated.
I think I tried that. It has the general issues games like Battlefield do, where you tend to die when you had absolutely no hint of any attackers nearby. Basically, leaning too far towards realism and fast time to kill.
Part of why I like Deep Rock Galactic is that the traversal and objectives still require a constant level of critical thinking, even if it’s usually pretty simple. There is more going on than twitch reflex shooting. The guns feel good and the fact that it’s crowd control means you usually aren’t snap shooting but thinking about how to best control the enemies.
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 can honestly go one step further and say I’m just tired of shooters. Unfortunately that seems to be all my friends want to play, so I typically just hang out in voice and chat instead of game with them nowadays.
Yeah, that’s why prefer to avoid PvP games. I’m not good, tbf, and the stress I’m feeling is just too much to handle - my real life is stressful enough, thank you very much…
For example, I would love to experience Sea of Thieves on my own, finding some treasures, fighting skeletons or the Kraken. But the PvP aspect is killing it for me. I’m not entitled to anything, of course. Plenty of people wouldn’t enjoy a pure PvE Sea of Thieves, but as far as I’m concerned, that kind of game would bring me back for sure…
