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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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I’m gonna come out swinging: not even a game, but two entire fucking genres:
Battle royales. I am like 90% convinced that gamers have been tricked by some dark psychology that has somehow convinced them that these games are worth playing. I don’t know whether it’s because the quality of FPS games has been so low for so long that today’s gamers have never really played a properly fun shooter or what. Battle royales are 75% downtime. You spend so long fucking around parachuting in to the map, walking around, collecting stuff, bla bla bla, interspersed by just a few moments of action, and when you get killed it usually doesn’t feel fair, it’s because a whole other team showed up right as you were already fighting someone else and put you in a nearly impossible situation.
MOBA games are just RTS games with the best bits taken out.
I didn’t say that you’re wrong or lying at all! Like, MOBAs aren’t for me but otherwise I have no problems with them. But for Battle Royales, yeah, I said that I thought that they trick people, like they’re intentionally really manipulative. For example, loot boxes - they’re fun, but manipulative. Know what I mean?
Battle royales seem to be specifically designed to exploit human psychology to maximise the amount of time that a person plays the game by having specifically timed dopamine releases and manipulating game matchmaking to keep players playing for longer than they would have otherwise. Have you ever felt yourself thinking “damn, I should stop playing, but I want a win first?” That’s exactly what I’m talking about.
I’m glad you enjoy the game and I’m not trying to take that away from you, but I just have an “ick” for that genre, it feels abusive in a way I can’t really put my finger on. And yeah for sure I am overthinking it, this entire thread is an invitation to overthink video games ;p
I think if it was personal, my comment wouldn’t be the #1 most upvoted comment in the thread, honestly.
I think people just like the competitive-ness of a battle royale. People like to win and nothing says "winner" more like being the last survivor out of 100, you know?
Nah, that’s not really it, imo. If that was the case then they could just stick 100 people in a lobby and get them to square off 1v1 in a tournament until there’s one winner.
I swear that battle royales are specifically designed for precisely timed dopamine release to make players have longer play sessions and to encourage addiction
You're really just describing live service games though, of which most battle royale games that come out in the modern era are a part of. Pretty much any AAA online multiplayer game is going to be about encouraging addiction and dopamine release. I think why battle royale games seem to be at the forefront of this is because they are inherently online multiplayer games. You couldn't really make a true "battle royale" game before the prevalence of online multiplayer without some major concessions.
Battle royale games happened to be the industry darling back in 2017 which is why so many AAA studios rushed to carve live service models out of them. If you pay close attention in the coming years you may notice that this will likely again happen to whatever new burgeoning genre takes the industry by storm. They already did it back in the early 2000s with MMO's.
Yeah, you’re not wrong - I guess the difference is that when it comes to battle royales, the medium is the message. I don’t give a shit about levels, ranks, customisation options, skins, perks, etc. in Call of Duty, so all of those manipulative tricks they pull in that area don’t really achieve much. But for Apex Legends, the manipulative shit is the game itself.
And you think battle royales have too much down time?
I don't play them because they're all prey to the modern aggressive cash grab bullshit most online games are, but most of the downtime you're discussing is actually active and engaged. You need to be consciously making a decision during the parachute part to decide where you want to land. All the "collecting" is constantly under stress, because if you aren't aware of your surroundings at all times, you could be dead. The whole game mode has a tension to it that most others don't, because dying in death match doesn't cost you anything but 10 seconds to respawn.
Lots of games had duel modes without downtime, when your duel ends, you get paired up with another player whose duel ended recently. It’s a few seconds at most usually.
I never felt particularly stressed during the collection segment, just bored, and from the other guy who wrote that he likes that time to mess around with his friends, I don’t know that your experience is universal.
That feeling of tension that you describe was absolutely present for me playing traditional deathmatch. The drive to want to win was strong enough to make me give a shit about the game. Especially if it was like, a clan match or something.
There's also the chaos aspect. Put 100 people in an arena and pretty much anything can happen. The top player can find themselves overwhelmed by people, and any competent player can come out the winner with a bit of luck. It keeps things from getting boring in the way a standard 8v8 in a standard map might get.
For me it's pretty much any competitive multiplayer game. I don't dislike the games, I usually dislike the communities. That was one of the big things that turned me away from Overwatch (the first one) for example, the gameplay was fun but I just wish I could choose who I was playing with.
Needless to say, I stick with singleplayer games these days, or at least less competitive multiplayer games. Games with good local multiplayer, like SSBU, are also pretty fun when I can get a group together.
It’s a modern gaming thing, in my experience. If you play old multiplayer games, the communities are usually much nicer.
Battle Royals - for me, it's about how the consequences heighten the tension, and how the threat of getting unceremoniously smashed back to the lobby heightens the victories.
Playing with friends makes the the whole experience fun. If you drop and have some downtime 'just' gearing up, you can chat and hang out and goof around. Then when shit kicks off, it's just so much more impactful (imo) than a game where you've just died and respawned a bunch already and you can do the same again. The teamwork and communication has to be next level and it feels so damn good to win a round, especially when you've been on the back foot and had to claw your way out of tough fights.
No mind tricks, not fussed about loot boxes and skins, just awesome memories from when we where playing enough to get almost half decent at it.
....and now I'm missing Apex Legends, might reinstall and remember that my friends don't play it any more
Hahaha ummm yeah as for your last sentence, I finally got around to getting a diagnosis for adult adhd recently and yes, having that focus naturally demanded of your brain by something you actually enjoy doing is definitely soothing. Kinda explains all of the activities I've always been drawn to (intense games, sim racing, rock climbing, skydiving etc)
Battle royal's taught me what it would feel like to be gaslighted. Surely nobody thinks they are fun. The only sane answer is all my friends have conspired to induce paranoia in me.
Ahh, for some folks, MOBAs are RTS games with the worst bits taken out!
RTS games are currently in a big slump (nobody's really making them, and the player base on the ones that exist has seriously dried up) because most people only like half the game.
The people who love the micro end up going to MOBAs like League or Smite. The people who love the macro end up going to 4X/Grand Strategy like Stellaris or Crusader Kings. The market of people who equally enjoy both aspects is pretty small. Like, I'll never buy a bag of Chex mix again, now that I know I can get a whole bag of just rye chips.
To make the scene even more anemic, the skill cap right now is so high. I know several people (including me) who tried to get into Starcraft 2, only for their first random opponent to be a person with 20,000 APM who thinks a match lasting longer than two and a half minutes is a slog. It's not even possible to learn from your mistakes when you get stomped that hard, that fast. But the single-player part does nothing to prepare you (other than maybe letting you figure out what the buttons do), and it's going to happen just about every time (because the only people still playing are the people who have been playing for a decade or more).
Oh yeah, for sure, 100%. I know that this is incredibly opinions based. Every time I play a MOBA, I just think how much more fun I’d have playing an RTS!
totally understandable, they're so close in controls, but so completely different in gameplay and pacing.
That downtime in a battle royale creates a really fun tension. Unfortunately, it does feel like dominant strategies emerge in that genre a little too easily, and then they become repetitive, so you don't get that early feeling with the game for more than a few weeks.
MOBAs can take many forms, and a lot of them don't look anything like an RTS, but they do usually give you the good parts of leveling up and becoming more powerful in an RPG over the course of about a half hour.
I highly disagree with the 2nd point
I hate RTS because there are so much going on everywhere at the same time that I just can't handle it. You gotta master your production while scouting while repelling raids while strategizing to see what kind of army the opponent is building while exploring the tech tree and.. damn how did they just send an army of 50 fellas??
MOBAs allow me to fully focus on the moment and whatever I'm doing instead of being perpetually late on the actions that need doing
Yeah, I understand that, and I guess they’re not for everyone. I’ve got pretty severe ADHD and I love the “everything happening everywhere all at once” feeling that RTS has
@potterman28wxcv @Blake
Imo theoretical #RTS development just stopped after StarCraft and total annihilation.
Sup com is my favorite but nobody really tried to reimagine what "RTS" should mean.
Not like COD -> Doom(2016) did for fps.
So both perspectives are valid and deal with unsolved problems that are unfortunately just hard and not profitable to solve.
Battle Royales: there are pros and cons to the format over traditional FPS. The real story here is that Fortnite in particular also frequently comes out with tons of fun and ridiculous weapons and items which is something that other companies don't really do.
Ie: chrome that lets you turn into a fast moving blob, a katana with a charge dash range so big that it's considered a mobility item, a handheld napalm cannon
Are you a more eloquent me? This is exactly what I feel about both Battle Royales and MOBAs. How and why? I just don't see it. I have friends who enjoy both genres and I've talked to them many times and asked them to explain why they find it fun. I still don't get it. Dark psychology indeed. That's the only thing that explains it for me.
I would respect your opinion if you presented it as an opinion, but your comment just reads as a condescending statement towards gamers who enjoy those genres. I don't play either of those genres either, but I respect that people do enjoy them.
I would respect your opinion about my opinion if you presented it as an opinion about my opinion…
Of course it’s just my opinion. I respect people who enjoy those games absolutely, 100%. No disrespect at all. I didn’t even say anything negative about MOBAs except the fact that I didn’t personally enjoy them. You’re taking this way too personally.
Black Mesa?
I was thinking more like Unreal Tournament 1999 kind of thing. Black Mesa was a decent game though, but I didn’t play any multiplayer.
I'd recommend Quake Champions if it wasn't dead as hell
I played the shit out of quake live a few years ago! It was really good fun.
Quake live is great. I sometimes use it to 1v1 some friends and it works great for that.
I have never played a MOBA but some quick sessions of Vainglory in an old iPhone... If that counts.
I can see the charm in the genre I guess.... But battle royals? Hell no, you wrote it damn perfectly... It is a huge waste of time, whether it is for the grinding mechanics, or the camping mechanics, or the unfair situations, but that tension does well for streaming guys, I think that is why the genre got so popular? Like those brainless games that you see on social media like Facebook about driving trailers in messy roads or those Five Nights at Freddie's kinds of games?
Totally agree with point #1. I was a staunch supporter of Fortnite when it was a zombie defense base building game. Then everybody latched on to the battle royale and I hated it, and every battle royale that hopped on the bandwagon afterwards.
Spend 20-30 minutes collecting loot just to win or lose it all in a sudden burst of conflict... shit gives me hypertension