The battle royale genre, a recent trend
For some time now, a game mode has become increasingly popular. Present on various titles, it is constantly gaining new followers and has even made a place for itself on the streaming site Twitch: It is the battle royale genre.
This genre is inspired by the Japanese novel Battle Royale by Kōshun Takami. Its concept remains simple: A multitude of gamers are placed in a server in a gigantic, often extremely open map. They must hunt down weapons and equipment in order to survive against the other gamers until only one player remains. So, the concept is rather simplistic but one thing is for sure, the battle royale style has more and more followers. Very often similar with free FPS.
That’s why games like Arma III or Minecraft (which don’t have much in common) have more or less large communities of gamers who are increasingly interested in the battle royale genre, abandoning the original game mode, sometimes for the sake of the game.
So what exactly is a battle royale game?
As you will have understood, the battle royale is a genre of video games mixing survival and shooting games by means of a game concept inspired by the last man standing mechanic. This game mode is the future of MMOs 2018. The appearance of the battle royale is the logical continuation of the great success of the Hunger Games saga, whose concept was very quickly adapted to the Minecraft title servers.
Furthermore, the battle royale has its origins in DayZ. It is a mod of ARMA II that appeared a few years ago (2013) before being formalised as a standalone game. Brendan Greene then designed a mod based on this principle, called Battle Royale, for this same game as well as ARMA III. Afterwards, he was a consultant for the title H1Z1: King of the Kill, which also used the battle royale concept, before designing PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which democratised the genre in 2017. Very practical in esports.
The major strength of the new Battle Royale genre is without doubt its action-packed games that are truly rewarding for the gamer. Indeed, even if the latter does not finish in the lead, he will be entitled to a more or less high place in the ranking depending on the moment he died. Thus, at each game the desire to gain a few places is always there. This is why in a battle royale you will always change your strategy and optimize the ones that work best in order to find your style of play. Finally, you should know that the games in this genre are rather short and offer intense game phases without necessarily spending hours and hours in front of your PC.
See also >> Glossary