#it's possible we might get some sort of chaotic gamemode to queue up on in the future

[neproxrezi]

well that was the best event dead by daylight has done! i hope future ones are this game-changing

think my oni is probably set for life now

[brainvalve-blog]

Working as Intended: Battle Royale from a Game Design Perspective

Hi and welcome to Working As Intended, a series which delves into how game design interacts with players to create our experiences, intended or not. In this post, we dive into Battle Royale, the undeniably wildly popular game mode of recent years.

But what makes Battle Royale, from a game design perspective, tick? What can it learn from other game modes before it? Join us as we dissect its double-edged approach to multiplayer combat, and see in what directions Battle Royale can evolve into the future.

Battle Royale, A Brief History

Battle Royale has a lot of small variations between its implementations in PUBG, Fortnite, H1Z1, Minecraft, and soon Call of Duty: BlackOps 4 and Battlefield 5. Yet in all of them, there is an alluringly simple, easily understood core definition:

A large number of players start. The last one standing wins.

Outside of gaming, this is probably most popularly remembered as the basis for the original Japanese film Battle Royale (2000) and its spiritual Western successor, The Hunger Games (2012-2015, film).

In the films, the winning squad is less than happy to win chicken dinners

However, this central idea of “Battle Royale” precedes even the Japanese film it’s named after. It’s more generally known as the “Last Man Standing” game mode, and have been implemented in limited form in older games, especially custom Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Doom Free-for-All modes. CounterStrike: Global Offensive and Rainbow Six: Siege, two popular first-person-shooters today, are in fact team-based Last Man Standing modes.

DOOM multiplayer, the grandfather of first-person shooter deathmatch (credit)

So what makes Battle Royale distinct from Last Man Standing? Two key elements:

First, Battle Royale involves an unprecedented number of players per game. While older games could only manage maybe 8 players at a time, Battle Royale is implicitly understood to involve up to 100 players at once, a technical limitation of both processing power and network optimizations which made it impossible before now.

Second, whereas many Last Man Standing game modes are a stricter ruleset applied on top of existing DeathMatch rules regarding weapons and equipment, Battle Royale starts every player without anything, and randomly distributes its equipment. For a clearer example, a custom Quake III Last Man Standing game would take place on a normal DeathMatch map, where weapon spawns were as stationary as before. In Battle Royale games, the same building will contain different equipment every game.

In other words, Battle Royale is the logical conclusion of increasingly powerful technology married to the idea of Last Man Standing.

And it’s popular beyond belief. Love it or hate it, its rapid success over other, older, more established game modes such as Team DeathMatch (Call of Duty, Battlefield), or Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBA’s, like League of Legends or DOTA 2) is undeniable:

Just look at that viewer count lead!

After its Beta launch in March 2017, PUBG broke Steam’s all-time high for concurrent players with 3.2 million players on December 29th, 2017. Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode launched in September 26, 2017, and has recently overtaken PUBG for concurrent number of players with its own 3 million mark as PUBG still maintains a healthy 1.7 million concurrent players. Checking Twitch.tv’s videogame livestreaming section shows Fortnite reliably holding first place, with PUBG not too far behind.

Battle Royale--befitting its name--is King. Long live the King.

The Royale Recipe

To understand how Battle Royale got here, let’s look at 3 key pillars of its game design: Chaos, Reward, and Player Density, and see how they affect player engagement, for better or for worse.

The Beauty in Chaos

On its surface, Battle Royale is a modified ruleset of the standard Free-for-All Deathmatch gamemode found as early as the original DOOM multiplayer days. Every player for themselves, murdering each other.

But the inherent draw of Deathmatch combat cannot be the reason why the Battle Royale game mode has become popular. If so, Battle Royale games would not have surpassed Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Halo, which have honed their mechanical craft of Deathmatch over decades, and none of those would have surpassed Quake or Unreal Tournament, which are the purest distillation of mechanically complex, skill-based Deathmatch combat.

Quake Live, a surviving remnant of purist arena deathmatches (credit)

Instead, Battle Royale’s biggest draw lies in its inherent randomness, and the chaos which ensues due to it.

In traditional Deathmatch games, there is a structure which the player can reliably expect: In Call of Duty and Battlefield, players know they will fight over objectives using pre-set loadouts they decide before hand. In Halo, Quake, and Unreal Tournament every spawn is guaranteed a specific base loadout and power weapon spawns are predetermined. The chaos in these games lies in the combat, but the macrostructure which founds that combat is stationary, if not at least predictable.

In contrast, Battle Royale expands the chaos to beyond just combat. Like a lethal game of 100-player poker, every player is dealt a vastly varying hand: Where you spawn, and who spawns with you. What weapons and equipment have spawned in that location, and who gets to them first. Loot package drop locations, vehicle spawns, and the location of the ever-shrinking “safe” zone are also randomly determined.

An airdrop in PUBG, which is, you guessed it, random (credit)

In a Battle Royale game, this randomness creates a focus on adaptation and ensures that every game can be vastly different. In one game, you might still be using a cruddy pistol and barely any items for half the match. In another, you will come across a stash of high-level equipment, luckily claim a vehicle before anyone else, and try to protect yourself from other players who notice your loot.

This game-to-game variance is key to extended player engagement, and in single-player games is called “replayability,” though this term is curiously not used for multiplayer games. A predictable game is boring, and can lose one’s interest quickly. A chaotic game, therefore, commands attention by promising some crazy new adventure with every iteration.

Without this chaos, Battle Royale condenses into just another Free-for-All Deathmatch, and it is this chaos which makes Battle Royale distinct.

It’s OK, Try Again!

Beyond the game mechanics of the game mode, its implementation in the most popular Battle Royale games like Fortnite and PUBG has a lot to do with its popularity: Namely, mechanics which seek to minimize punishment while maximizing reward.

Tfw your squad gets wiped but you remember you can re-queue (credit 1, 2)

Any game, single-player or multiplayer, is inherently a reward-punishment machine. Player does something, and the game rewards them for a successful completion of an action, or punishes them for failing to do so. In the simplest games like Pong, you either score, or you get scored on. PacMan gets more points, or you lose a life. In other words, you win (reward) or you lose (punishment). Though not always appreciated by the player, how games handle distributing and handling both has a huge impact on player engagement.

According to Behavioral Psychology, training an individual to perform an action well involves both high reward for success and harsh punishment for failure. This can be seen in formal ranked systems in sports and competitive games, where losses gain nothing and winner takes all. But for arcade-y games like Fortnite or PUBG, the goal isn’t to train, but to be fun for a long time--and this means trying to minimize punishment.

Fortnite and PUBG succeed particularly because when you die/lose, this punishment is made as short as possible. Unlike CounterStrike: Global Offensive or Rainbow Six: Siege, the player is not held hostage and forced to face their failure for the remaining duration of the match. When players are punished by in-game death in Fortnite and PUBG, they are free to leave immediately, and find a new game. Like as we often wish in real life when we make a social blunder, Fortnite and PUBG let you quickly move past your failure and try again for success with no judgment or penalty. Comparatively, in CounterStrike: Global Offensive or Rainbow Six: Siege, leaving a losing game will result in a decrease in ranking and additional penalties such as bans.

This principle of a rapid reset is why so many difficult platformers, notably Super Meat Boy, implement a near-instantaneous re-try, to minimize frustrations by immediately giving the players another chance.

You would NOT try this with long respawn timers (credit)

Meanwhile, both Fortnite and PUBG always give you some sort of reward, even when you aren’t the last player alive (and thus, “won”). Though winning obviously gives the highest in-game currency, losing still rewards a decreased amount, scaling by high how well you did.

Hence, currently successful Battle Royale games always give you some reward, with a near-negligible punishment, making player engagement always feel worthwhile.

Map Sizes and Player Density

The problem with permanent-death Deathmatch game modes is that typically the game map is made for a certain ideal number of players. Once that number reduces, the map becomes too large for the players left, and meaningful player-versus-player interaction like combat decreases to a point where it is more boring than stimulating. Anyone who tries to play the gigantic Conquest Large maps in Battlefield titles with a half-full server understands this feeling.

Awkward... (credit)

To maintain an ideal player density, all modern Battle Royale games implement a “safe” zone mechanic, where as the game progresses, the valid playable portion of the map decreases. Be left outside the safe zone when it shrinks, and you will take a constant drain on health. This not only preserves player density by forcing smaller numbers of people closer on a smaller map, but also guarantees that if there are more people alive than expected, the shrinking map will result in more combat and more deaths.

From a developer’s perspective, this also means controlling resources being used per match. By better controlling the number of players left over the course of the game, the developers can better predict and allocate server resources. For the player, this translates to some structure in the otherwise rampant chaos of Battle Royale games, by guaranteeing players that dwindling players don’t mean dwindling action.

LESS than the Sum of its Parts

While the above pillars of game design, individually, have made the Battle Royale game mode great, they are also contradictory to each other’s purposes, resulting in games which, unfortunately, end up being less than the sum of its parts.

Chaos is Unfair

Chaos is what makes Battle Royale, Battle Royale. But chaos, in its current implementation, inherently undermines any reward and punishment structure which is so critical in any game. Though most games depart from traditional Behavioral Psychology by opting for minimized punishment and near-constant states of reward, it is a universal wisdom that to be effective, any punishment or reward must be consistent. Getting punished sometimes and getting rewarded sometimes only leads to confusion, frustration, and--most deadly for games--disengagement.

Technically, Battle Royale games consistently match actions with reward and punishment: Your health goes to 0, you die and lose. You survive more, you get more in-game currency. But the conditions under which you reach these requirements is anything but consistent, and a large part of this is problematically outside of player control.

MarioKart’s similar dilemma with item boxes (credit)

A good thought experiment for considering the balance of player skill of any game is to ask “what would occur if 2 clones every fought each other?” Assuming both players to be at full health and of equal skill, if the answer is anything BUT a 50%-50% outcome, it’s a problem. And in Battle Royale games, it’s the luckier clone that wins: If you cannot find good starting gear to compete with other players with better guns, armor, and healing supplies, you will most likely lose. If other players just happened to also spawn with you in the same area, your chances of securing any loot at all is very low. If you cannot find a vehicle, your chances of dying en-route to a safe zone are very high due to your slow speed making you an easy target at range. If you cannot get good optical scopes and the end-match safe zone is in a wide-open grassy hill, your chances of surviving the long-range sniping match for first place is low. If the safe zone is instead in an urban area but you have no good close-range weaponry, you are also similarly screwed. Fortnite doesn’t have vehicles and has a smaller map, but all the other randomized determinants of success remain.

To be fair, as the match progresses, killing others often will even the playing field as players, by scavenging corpses, naturally accrue better gear like a food chain. However, the early culling period one is expected to survive to get to that fairer playing field is far too chaotic.

TSM’s vsnz took 22 player deaths to find his first pistol. 24 for a shotgun.

In short, the very chaos which makes each game so dynamic is also what makes them inherently and undeniably unfair. This is why tournament skill-based games such as Quake have such well-considered map design (as opposed to the “take random assets and scatter them over a landscape” approach of Battle Royales) and stationary equipment spawn locations--to hold all extenuating conditions to a strict standard to let player skill be the only determinant of victory.

And this is why Battle Royale games, in their current state, cannot ever be viably competitive. With so many random factors, traditional ranking systems of punishing losses isn’t fair all the time. Determining who is “better” at the meta-game (and not just individual shootouts) requires an inordinately large number of games. Even a best-of-five structure means nothing when everything--from your damage output to ability to absorb damage to mobility to effective combat range--is largely out of your control.

This is why no Battle Royale game implements ranked matchmaking systems: It’s mechanically impossible.

For the players, this means that current Battle Royale games can feel more like a slot-machine than a fair fight. Sure, by the mid-game with more similar loot, they can have a say in their fate, but getting there isn’t guaranteed. The short-reset period and hopping into another game is just another pull of the lever, another roll of the dice. Victory feels cheaper when you realize that most of the players of that 100 died due to poor luck rather than your own superior skill.

This isn’t to say, however, that any chaos in game design is inherently bad--some level of unpredictability and chaos is necessary for replayability. But there is such a thing as poorly designed chaos. Chaos, to be most effective, demands the same kind of consideration and purposeful focus as stationary game mechanics.

Chaos might be fun, but unfair game design isn’t.

Chaos, sometimes. Maybe.

The safe zone mechanic is an ingenious solution to preserving player density on a large map. But just like Chaos, its current implementations doesn’t quite solve the problem it was applied to.

When the game starts, the map has to be large enough to hold 100 players and all the shenanigans they might get into. And yet, this humongous map still has to be viable for consistent play for the last 2 people as well as it had for 100. With the safe zone system, this means that on average, players have a tremendous distance to cover, because they are expected to move the same distance that the safe zone is shrinking by.

For example, PUBG’s first map, Erangel, is 8x8 kilometers. Player movement speed was clocked in at 6.3 m/s. Assuming the player dropped on the southern or northern shore of the largest island, only 2 km from the center, reaching said center without a vehicile would take five full minutes of nothing but running.

PUBG’s Erangel (credit)

Anyone that’s played Fortnite or PUBG knows just how much time each match is just spent running. And running. And running. And often, you just get sniped from the distance from somebody you couldn’t see who had set up before you.

Granted, there is some argument for the heightened tension while running to the new safe zone. It’s a welcome downtime between the adrenaline spikes of direct combat. But again, as with Chaos, there isn’t much control that you have over it. Since safe zones are random, even spawning in the center of the map will involve lots and lots of running. Downtime’s good, but too much downtime becomes the chore between the actually entertaining gameplay loop of combat.

This wisdom is something that Battlefield in particular has been aware of for some time. Battlefield, for its large 64-player combined-arms matches, requires a sufficiently large map to house the chaos, but it makes sure to inundate each team’s spawn with rapidly respawning vehicles to ensure that players won’t spend long before careening into their next firefight.

Because the irony about chaos is that as fun as it is, you still want chaos to be consistent.

Making Battle Truly Royale

Despite the above critique, Battle Royale is still an incredibly enjoyable game mode--just with many bumps left to be ironed out. This shouldn’t be surprising: Any new medium in any entertainment industry has growing pains. First Person Shooters took over a decade to get to the standardized, ergonomic controls we take for granted today. Fighting games went through countless iterations to work out its exact science of combos, interrupts, animation cancels, and balance.

And Battle Royale can learn from others’ mistakes to fix its existing problems, and avoid future ones. Why replicate somebody else’s mistake, when you can reap benefits from their solutions?

Chaos, structured

Battle Royale needs chaos, but currently it’s a bit too much--the mid to late game are far fairer and interesting, but surviving the first few minutes seem more random than skill when somebody else grabs the shotgun before you do and kills you before you take a few steps. You immediately re-queue for another game again and again until you’re the one that picks up that first gun and survives. To minimize frustration even more, Battle Royale needs to tamper this early chaos, but not so much that it loses its identity.

A potential solution is to give every player a terrible--but still lethal--starting weapon, perhaps a low-capacity pistol with only two magazines. Something to kill one or two other players with and take their weapon, but no more, kind of like the core concept of the Liberator pistols from World War 2. Perhaps they could be Liberator pistols in implementation.

The Liberator and its spiritual link, Quake 3′s machine gun (credits 1, 2)

Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament implement something like this with the weak machinegun. It won’t win over higher level weapons, but  it’s JUST enough to defend yourself until you can find a weapon spawn. The proposed pistol’s low magazine capacity, and the two magazines punishes wasting it on trying to hit players that are still landing, instead driving players to use it on each other on the ground.

Another potential solution is to make the starting melee option a little bit more deadly. Currently, in both PUBG and Fortnite, the starting melee weapons of fists and pickaxe, respectively, barely do any damage and require repeated headshots to be lethal. Again, they could learn from Quake and Unreal Tournament, where the base melee weapon is incredibly deadly, but obviously limited by its range. In such ranged-focused games like Battle Royale, this will allow freshly landed players opportunities to fight each other, and reward them for creatively ambushing other players who had gotten the gun first.

Either way, Battle Royales’ problematic early game can easily be remedied with the introduction of some form of early self-defense which is weak enough to quickly be outmoded, but still capable enough to give players a more skill-expressive way to survive the early game.

Game Maps vs Literal Maps

Currently, Battle Royale games feature maps which seem like an actual deserted sprawling wasteland. While these maps can immerse you in the fantasy of survival, Battle Royale should realize why other games have avoided real-world logic when designing their maps.

The problem with “realistic” maps is that they’re great for looking realistic. But they are NOT great at being conducive to play. Even Battlefield’s larger Conquest maps have clear thought put into them, designed in ways to funnel action and make sure the map itself is balanced. Each capture point is designed with considerations as to its vulnerability to ranged bombardment, and approach paths for infantry, vehicles, and aircraft. Interiors of bunkers are arranged to give teams defensive options, as well as ample flanking paths for attackers. Countours of the map and vehicle-friendly roadways are arranged between these capture points to offer both main and side paths between every objective. There are always options for players who want to stick to close-quarters, and those who prefer holding longer sightlines. A smart player can reach top of the leaderboard playing with just a shotgun in Battlefield--most players of Battle Royale recognize this is currently impossible in the unfairly range-favored maps of current maps.

Left: Nevada’s Toponah mining town. Right: PUBG’s Miramar. (credits 1, 2)

Likewise, Battle Royale would do well to really give its map more consideration. Not that there hasn’t already been work put into it, but the maps shouldn’t get any less attention because “pssh it’s a Battle Royale, let people just fight it out.” Especially as we talk about reworking Safe Zones later, map design should also consider where safe zones spawn, and the approach paths to them. Currently, Battle Royale games universally give unfair advantage to players who luck out and get powerful sniper rifles or high-powered optics for assault rifles. A more focused map design which gives more options would relieve this imbalance, and give less fortunate players a fairer chance versus those god-forsaken snipers behind that one tree you never could’ve seen (you know what I’m talking about). Map design is an incredibly subtle but critical aspect of any action-driven PvP game, large and small. The real world is captivating, but not made for play.

Running a Little Less

For Battle Royale games, their large maps are a defining characteristic. So making it smaller by default (though Fortnite IS much, much smaller compared to PUBG) will only make people question why they aren’t just playing a Free-for-All DeathMatch where the action is more fair and directed.

Yet, as discussed before, current Battle Royales still have players running for so long, and unfairly punishing players based on vehicle spawns and safe zone spawns.

Any solution should address this issue, giving players a more reliable option to traverse long distances, but this solution should also be player skill-dependent, so that it doesn’t feel unfair and creates opportunity for counter-play.

Fortnite already has a pseudo-solution, where launch pads can be used to trigger the glider, letting players traverse faster than running at the cost of some building materials and the vulnerability of being in midair. For a more vertical game than PUBG, this also offers valuable vertical movement on-the-go.

Still, it isn’t very effective for moving a large distance. A possible solution could be like the light-cycles from TRON, where players must take time to summon an unarmored, fast, single-rider motorcycle. It could also possibly consume some limited resource, so that it forces players to consider when they would activate it. Taking damage while summoning could interrupt it, to make sure it can’t be used for a rapid getaway. The single-rider aspect would prevent a squad member from riding on the back as a mobile self-defense platform, making this mode of transport extremely vulnerable.

Obviously, this would work better for a more cartoonish game like Fortnite, but surely a more creative person would be able to come up with a similar reliable method for players to traverse long distances.

Approaching Safe Zones

There is a more controversial solution to both the map design and movement problems: Making the Safe Zone always spawn in the same central location. This “ultimate” safe zone would make map design much easier, now it gives developers a predictable play pattern to work around.

For example, having a stationary “safe zone” could have more valuable weapons around it, so that players could plan out their strategies from the very beginning: Do you drop near the center for good loot, where you can stay put for a while and not expose yourself by moving? But it will also make you an easier target, since more people might have the same idea. Or do you drop further away from the center, where you might be safer for longer, but you have a longer trek towards the center?

Hunger Games’ horn, the OG stationary safe zone (credit)

This central safe zone would also allow map designers to apply more traditional map design, making use of chokepoints, flanking routes, alternative approach routes, sightlines, and giving players more options given their playstyle. Close-range favoring players could move through small rooms towards the center. Longer-range players could sit at the top and center, overseeing incoming threats.

This safe zone design, however, takes away much of the chaos inherent in modern Battle Royales, and this implementation is ultimately up to game designers and what their vision of their game is.

Another different approach to the safe zone is to make the penalty much less arbitrary. Currently, Battle Royales use a mysterious, arbitrary wall which damages players outside its bounds. For a more thematic penalty to safe zones, in-game hazards which players can fight against creates a more skill-driven penalty system.

For example, Fortnite Battle Royale is built on a single player zombie survival game. Why not have the safe zone spawn zombies of increasing strength outside its bounds? That way, players are at least given the chance to fight their way to safety, giving skilled players more leeway than just being forced to slowly take damage. This also forces players to consider staying a little longer to loot while expending resources to fight off zombies, versus just speeding straight to the safe zone.

Battle Royale, Moving Forward

Battle Royale, as a fresh new game mode in the otherwise stagnant shooter genre, has been experiencing unprecedented success.

And with unprecedented success, comes the inevitable spread, as Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and Paladins announce their own Battle Royale game modes. Beyond officially licensed PUBG and Fortnite mobile ports, there have been a rash of other mobile developers who have released clones. There is still active speculation around Battlefield 5, and there is no doubt more game developers will try their own hand at the game mode before the craze dies down.

Though many on Fortnite and PUBG scoff at these “clones” and Call of Duty and Paladins fans bemoan their established franchises hopping on the bandwagon, gaming history can give us insight as to what this will mean for Battle Royale:

Not much, really.

Like with Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, Horde Mode, or Zombies Mode--all game modes which have innovated the shooter genre over the years--Battle Royale is a new and innovative remix of existing game mode rulesets that have been developed over the years for shooters. A dash of Free-for-All, a pinch of Last Man Standing, a little King of the Hill, all built upon a foundation of DeathMatch fundamentals. And as with those other game modes, we can expect Battle Royale to become more popular in existing shooter games which already feature some of those game modes.

At some point, these modes, too, were new (credit)

And just like those game modes, Battle Royale in the gaming industry will continue to evolve on a per-game basis. Battlefield found itself ideal for the Conquest game mode, whereas Call of Duty found itself better suited for Team DeathMatch and Search and Destroy. Whether or not, Fortnite and PUBG will keep surviving to be the respective top games in Battle Royale, there will also be game franchises for whom Battle Royale fits more naturally.

Scoff though we might on what we see as bandwagoners, never forget similar waves in the past when every first person shooter was called DOOM clones, and streamlined multiplayer arena shooters were Unreal Tournament clones. More recently, any horde mode was a Gears of War clones, and any MOBA was a DOTA clone. And yet, today we see those game modes in newer games without any bat of the industry’s eye.

Battle Royale will continue to improve, and innovate, too, the same way military shooters learned to diverge and specialize. We’ve already begun to see this with Fortnite’s more jazzed-up and family friendly approach, versus the more hardcore PUBG with H1Z1 somewhere in the middle.

And who knows, maybe just as Battle Royale is the innovative cocktail of game modes before it, Battle Royale itself might be used as the foundational basis for more new innovative game modes.

Either way, players will always shoot each other in the time-tested tradition established since the original DOOM.

We’ll just keep finding new and creative modes to do it.