About — Multiplayer Rulesets and the Battle Royale Genre
Video games evolve. What once was a new genre, the pixelated first person shooter, has become a high quality staple of modern video game design.
Every once in a while a new game comes out that does something so fundamentally different from what’s popular on the market, that it provides an experience unlike any other. Creating a compelling game, genre, and marketing campaign, Battle Royale is no doubt the latest trending genre in game development.
But what does Battle Royale do differently that players have been wanting? And more importantly how does it do it?
To find out, let’s take a look at how the shooter genre became the massive hit it is today.
Shooters were one of the first games to capitalize on what psychology now calls the Self-Determination-Theory, or SDT. The three components of SDT outline what all humans need to motivate and initiate their behavior internally.
Without going too much into detail, SDT for games is comprised of three components of play: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Competence comes down to players wanting to get better and master the game. Autonomy means having choice over your actions, and having those actions have long-lasting results in game. Relatedness is knowing where you belong within social systems of the game, whether that be with artificial bot characters, or other people playing with you in real-time. Shooters are a neatly wrapped package that fulfill all the moment to moment needs of SDT. First Person Shooters are skill based games that require precise aiming mastery. At the same time FPS games allow players to customize their arsenal, while incorporating various options to plan their approach. Lastly, FPS games put you into a first person view of the story or the war around you, which is an incredibly effective way of allowing players to relate to characters or other players.
Battle Royale, for those who don’t know, was originally a book turned into a cult classic where 4th graders are sent to an island where they must kill each other to survive. Much to our surprise the alleged creators of the Battle Royale Genre have the same idea, 100 players are put on an island where only one survives. Is it really that simple though, take a hit book / movie idea and make it into a competitive new and invigorating gameplay experience?
Going back a few years, game developer Bohemia Interactive with their Design lead Dean Hall, released a mod for ARMA 2 called DayZ. ARMA is a military simulation game, alongside which there had been many modded servers and ‘custom game’ packages released. DayZ was different, it used the ARMA 2 engine to create something more than just a military simulation. Using all the components of ARMA, DayZ had an inventory system, scarce weapons and resources spread out across a huge map, and zombie spawns. Together, these systems create a post-apocalyptic zombie simulation. One where, as soon as you spawn into the game naked, you are looking to find resources, arms to defend yourself at the very least against the zombies. However, when you did find yourself hearing other voices, you took part in a very different social experience than what most games create today. In DayZ, the goal was to survive, it wasn’t about killing other players, so often times players would get players ready to barter, ready to fight, ready to walk away, and ready to do anything it means to just not die. And all of this content was player generated — which is both a good and a bad thing. On one hand you would get heated negotiations resulting in trades or a bloody battle, with captives and people involved, and on the other you would get the trolls screaming in your ear that they killed you. Either way the experience was unlike anything before in the First Person Shooter genre. Before, online shooters were strictly about killing enemies and protecting allies, but now the relationship between allies and enemies was blurred. For the first time, you got to decide who your allies and enemies were, allowing players to forge their own sense of belonging with the game and the other players.
Fast forward a few mod making years and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds(PUBG) jumps the technical hurdle of allowing 100 players to be in the same match. Although not all 99 other players are always on your screen, the game finds some creative ways to chunk players into rooms that ultimately trick you into thinking that you are one soldier out of one-hundred. The biggest design change from DayZ and PUBG aside from the change from a first to third person perspective is how the players relatedness is effectively streamlined. On average, a player in PUBG or Fortnite will encounter more players over time than in DayZ. Not only that but, there is no ambiguity in what you are supposed to do with those other players — take them out. This matters because the Battle Royale genre is built around this unique experience of overcoming the impossible one out of a hundred odds to become the winner of the chicken dinner (or match).
Experiences like this that create the player story of overcoming all odds and being ‘the one’ is possibly one of the most compelling experiences we as game developers can create, in reference to the monomyths hero. There are obviously other feedback loops and systems that make the player feel good, but the core system that changes how players relate to each other is what the Battle Royale genre has become known for. Knowing this, it is important to remember that when designing Royale-like-games players want to feel like they are threading a needle of impossible odds while demonstrating their skill.
Battle Royale is a necessary step in the evolution of video games, but before we start designing new entries in the battle royale genre, we should think about new ways for large groups of players to ‘relate’ to each other, as that is what allowed this genre to explode with success in the first place.
Let me tell you, there are a lot of ways this can happen. Take Albion Online, an MMO that allows 100 plus players to fight vs another 100 plus players, all on the same screen. The experience of being part of an army fighting a war, encourages a completely different relatedness for your players. One of the games I created, Duel Dice, tries to capture this different kind of Battle Royale relatedness — winning vs a large number of people, via one vs one matches where the winner will obtain all of the losing players currency and move up on the leaderboards to better prepare them for their next match in the arena. The twist: it’s a strategy game.
Next time you play a Battle Royale game, try thinking about where the game’s player experience incorporates relatedness, and how it fits within other games of the genre.
