| Title | Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 might have Battle Royale, and no single player campaign |
| Author | Nick Diamon |
| Posted in | News |
| When | April 17, 2018 |
There may be no traditional single player story campaign in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4..
Oh, cool, guess I don’t have to care about it at all then.
I believe the name Call of Duty still have street creed and will have for a long time.
Is what happens when you aim at young childrens (11 years old, 14 years old) when they grown they have nostalgia for these times.
I know at this point making a BR game is a joke (market saturation is a thing that exists) but CoD could probably make a fun BR version. PUBG despite the bugs and annoyances still exist and I believe is because some people want realism in their BR games and CoD can probably deliver that.
Theory: the surge in popularity of the Battle Royale genre comes mostly from the #1 frustration people have had in MOBA games (and Overwatch) since those came to the forefront 9 years ago: people are sick of bad teammates disproportionately dragging their team down.
We’ve now come full circle back to mid 90s Quake deathmatch.
Yeah, I don’t get ‘Battle Royale’ modes at all. Didn’t we play this a million times as deathmatch without respawns? Is it the shrinking play area mechanic that’s new?
I don’t get the appeal, maybe it’s for young kids who never played deathmatch and think it’s the new hotness. It feels like gaming regression to me, I have no interest.
There’s a few things that make it uniquely Battle Royale.
-
Large player pool (100 or so) to start that whittles down to last person (or duo) standing.
-
Players start with nothing. They must scavenge random weapons and armor from scattered locations, usually concentrated in buildings. These loot clumps encourage fights over resources.
-
Shrinking play space.
-
Players have some control over their initial spawn locations, allowing them to either go straight towards loot-rich locations with the risk of an early encounter, or more peaceful areas with less equipment.
-
Not essential, but a most popular BR games offer a clunky inventory system that requires player skill investment to manage.
Is a combination of the success of open world games and the BR formula that is, honestly, very fun.
I tried playing Fortenight for a week and just didn’t see the appeal.
It sounds fun being thrown into a Battle Royale scenario, but how it ends up actually playing out is 95% of the game is moving around the map with nothing going on. It’s up to an hour time investment that just ends suddenly when you either shoot someone who can’t see you or you get shot by someone you can’t see. It feels like a Battlefield game without teams or classes and you spawn five miles from the front that you have to hoof through a mostly empty server.
I couldn’t see any incentive to go out your way to get kills, other than looting the body (if they have better equipment worth looting, you probably can’t kill them. If your equipment is good enough to kill them, you don’t need their crappy loot drop). So you hunker down and stay hidden within the boundary for as long as possible and let everyone else kill each other to the end. This often got me to the final 10, but it was extremely boring and took forever.
Eventually I just chose every single match to spawn in a high loot area and deal with the instant chaos there. It was a lot less boring, you could quickly start a new round if you were killed, and if you survived you got an early leg up on everyone else with better loot. I didn’t see any point going back to the remote start locations for the stealthy long slog strategy.
But even with the instant chaos start, it wasn’t any more fun than any other FPS. In fact it’s worse in a lot of ways. That’s when I uninstalled because if the waiting game strategy was boring, and the instant action strategy was inferior to other shooters, what was the point? What does the 100 player count matter if you never encounter 80% of them? I thought it would be a lot more interesting if they started all 100 players together in a smaller area where everyone could theoretically encounter everyone else in the first few minutes. Or like the opening to the game in the first Hunger Games movie: everyone spawns in a huge circle able to see each other, with a massive pile of the best loot in the center. Do you sprint towards the best loot? Stop and settle on picking up lesser loot that’s closer to you? Continue sprinting unarmed to the very middle for the best stuff? Forget the inside of the circle entirely and skulk off to the remote surrounding woods?
The one quasi BR game I’m looking forward to is The Darwin Project. Less players, smaller arena, lots of interesting gadgets beyond “guns, armor, healing”, and creative tracking mechanics (must rest by a fire to avoid freezing like The Long Dark, but everyone will be able to see the fire and find you).