While the genre is without a doubt the most popular in the current gaming industry, one can’t help but see that developers are using it as an excuse to throw out sub-par or unpolished titles for a quick cash grab. There’s no denying that both PlayersUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) and Fortnite Battle Royale have popularized the genre, but it’s also because of them that we’ve seen a slew of mediocre or awful copycats.
Although you can’t really blame the developers for jumping on the bandwagon, seeing as to how much success it generates, it’s just a shame that it’s because of the genre’s popularity that we’re being subjected to games that took little to no effort to make. For example, the recently announced Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. It has been confirmed by its developers, Treyarch, that it will no longer have a single-player campaign and that it will instead focus heavily on multiplayer.
This means that players will just be shooting each other’s heads off in deathmatches, screaming at each other for cooperation in the bland and repetitive zombie mode, or trying to show off their survival skills in CoD’s new battle royale.
Think as to how much time and effort it will take Treyarch to develop this. They don’t have to worry about creating a deep and interesting story for everyone to invest in, record much audio except for a couple of grunts or screams, and there’s no need for them to compose a decent soundtrack as they know the players won’t be focusing on that aspect. It’s because they’re trying to capitalize on the success of the battle royale genre that they made the decision to come up with a low cost, high reward kind of game. But this is all assuming that people don’t care about anything but multiplayer and are willing to purchase it upon release.
It’s not that the genre isn’t fun as there’s certainly a good amount you can find with every game. The problem is that if there’s an oversaturation in the market, then there won’t be anything special for about 90% of them as they basically contain copy-paste material from the ones that have managed to develop a stable and/or continuously growing fanbase. While some do have interesting concepts that try to deviate from the standards of Battle Royale, most don’t know how to execute them in a way that would get players interested enough to keep playing.
If there isn’t anything new or if the develops don’t put their own spin to it, then don’t expect anything special with every new battle royale game released. There’s still a lot more coming out this 2018 and hopefully, they’re able to do something that will freshen up the genre. If not, then we can all just sit down and wonder as to what could have been if the developers actually took the time to develop decent games instead of another Fortnite or PUBG ripoff.
