I hate battle royale games. Every time I play them i get anxious and nervous, I cant take it anymore
I have played Apex Legends since it came out and I have about 900h between both steam and origin (mostly played during covid).
Since I stopped playing this rage games I feel much better
Tell me what you think of battle royale games in the comments if you want
I think for me, the main frustration is the way those games are structured. You run around for a few minutes and when you finally have decent equipment, someone shoots you out of nowhere and you get kicked out, have to requeue and start over again.
On the other hand, when I die in Overwatch, Valorant, Counter Strike, Quake, Unreal Tournament (yes, I’m old…) I know that I’ll be back in the action in a few seconds, I didn’t lose much progress and I can still win this.
I could use a resurgence of boomer shooters tbh
Imagine my reaction when they delisted UT 2016 💀 and im not even a boomer bro im 17
Check out Isonzo. It’s a WWI trench warfare game that is PvP (some games may have bots). But it’s objective based on offensive and defensive. You respawn really quick. It’s not like arena since it’s generally one shot kills and you’re further away but it’s a lot of fun.
Well I did have to spend minutes gathering armor or grabbing the wanted weapon sometimes in Quake II CTF or Quake 3. But yeah at least when you die you just respawn, no requeue.
You need cozy game time. It’s not good to add a lot of stress in the pursuit of entertainment! If it doesn’t bring you joy it’s not worth your time. I’m looking at you, League of Legends.
Agreed. At one point, I just quit all royale-type games, because there was enough stress in my life; especially when I worked on a computer all day. I needed a break from it. The smart move would have been playing an IRL sport of some kind, but I eluded that once again, and instead joined a modded Rust PvE server where I just run around the forest and chase chickens. That worked.
Not hating on people who like and enjoy PvP games, but to me it feels like it’s a good way for a developer to make a game that doesn’t actually have that much substance. Lacking content? Nothing to actually do in the game? NPCs are difficult to make interesting to fight? Just have players shoot each other. It’s basically content that creates itself, not to mention (if you have good matchmaking) the difficulty ramps up naturally without you having to write better enemy AI.
I just want to fight stuff alongside other people, rather than potentially making another person’s day just a little worse because I shot them before they shot me, you know? Is that too much to ask?
Dev difficulties are still there and not the same. Don’t understimate netcode, or just simply gun feel, balancing, map design, sound design. Those are very difficult to get right even if you do not have to write a story or code NPCs. Each games have different challenges.
Netcode, gun feel, balancing, map design, sound design, … all things that are present in co-op shooters as well. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with what you’re saying, but I feel like you have misunderstood what I was trying to communicate. (Which might be my fault.)
And yes, there are things that are unique (or more critical) to PvP shooters, but my point was: It’s overall less work, for developers and artists, to just have players fight each other over and over again, than to create content for players to cooperatively enjoy.
You have a point about less content development time. But don’t underestimate the complexity of getting the netcode right and balancing the PVP system.
It’s more like trading one set of problems for another, than it is a cop-out.
Plenty of games that lack substance in any category.
I did want to mention that, but left it out to keep my comment short. Yes, game development is very difficult and complex. Getting anything working out there is a huge accomplishment for everyone involved.
I have a feeling many companies found that the ratio of work (and thus investment) involved compared to the potential profit generated, especially with predatory MTX added to everything nowadays, means it’s pretty much a no-brainer to them to create PvP games rather than co-op ones.
Creating interesting gameplay systems and keeping things fresh for players is (I’d say) undoubtedly more difficult than just plotting players against one another. On top of that, netcode and balancing aren’t non-existent in co-op games.
Just take a look at the cancelled Blizzard MMO project “Titan”, which was partially repurposed to become Overwatch.
I AGREE
I feel it’s less of a cop-out and more of a matter of economy and the current state of video games.
The thing with game development is that the visuals always take the most resources and therefore the most effort (concept art, sculpting, retopologizing, modeling, texturing, rigging, animating, materials, particles, environment art).
You hit the nail on the head when you say that multiplayer is content that creates itself, and compared to singleplayer games for the same amount of “content/entertainment”, it does require exponentially less work in visuals and just a tiny bit more in engineering. In a singleplayer game, once you beat a level, you’re basically never seeing that map and all the love poured into it ever again. Replayability adds value to the visuals in a game, and what adds more replayability than multiplayer?
And that sort of transitions into the state of video games now, where these multiplayer games allocate all those extra development resources into the maintenance and expansion of the game by adding new seasons and firearms and skins and maps every few months, all to keep their playerbase playing and raking in the microtransaction revenue. It just makes economical sense to focus on the multiplayer.
Yeah, online competitive games just feel like I’m sitting an exam nowadays. I can do without the stress.
Also it feels like you spend ages running around in an empty field with nothing happening interspersed with seconds of not that great shooting gameplay
Some people attack this statement saying that “running around in an empty field” also happens in Minecraft and other survival games but I think the great difference is that minecraft is a sandbox game you can enjoy with your time and your pace, taking your time to build something, manage your crops, feeding your animals etc. There’s a little bit of challenge, but its an “emptiness full of stuff you can do”, something you cant in battle royale games since a game ends after a few dozens of mins
I feel the same about PvP in games in general. I just wanna vibe, maybe hang out with friends, and the sweat that comes from going against other people actively detracts from that.
Yeah, these games are fun and novel when you first start, but once you get even a little bit competitive at them they just become a chore. You have to constantly keep up with the meta, and constantly be playing to stay practiced. I guess that must appeal to some people, but the better I get at these games, the less fun I tend to have.
I think the bigger problem is how commital those games are. They all want you to play 24/7 which makes it hard to enjoy other games.
I love competitive games, but I have too many other games I want to play. Im not gonna grind on one when I could of played like 30 games off my list.
I stopped playing any game that makes me rage, because my dogs react as if I’m angry with them - since it’s just me and them in the room, obviously I must be mad with them.
Had this exact problem with my cat, didn’t rage-rage (slamming desk/mouse/keyboard have never been my thing) but I became irritated and she picked up on it. Her reaction was biting my hands, which took me too long to realise that it was a form to get me off the keyboard.
I switched from PC to console/playstation and I’m more chill playing in the couch, it doesn’t get me irritated and it’s just an all around more relaxing experience, the competitive scene especially on PC can be very toxic.
Cat stopped biting me, which is a huge plus also, because that little lovely shit really can bite hard.
I wanted you to know, I checked your username after I read your comment and it made me laugh.
Has your life improved?
It wasn’t ruining my life or anything, my “rage” is just swearing a bit, but they pick up on tone etc. So if I notice a game gets me like that, I just wont play it. It’s not exactly fun when they’re like that anyway.
I play pretty much everything. Some of my friends rage quit stuff when Im still 100% calm.
When it comes to BRs specifically, they can be very frustrating. Your winrate is inevitably low, due to there only being “one” winner per match, still me and my friends enjoy both Apex and Hunt: Showdown.
In both cases we started having a lot more fun when we started taking the games much less seriously, and not caring about whether the game told us we won.
In Apex, instead of wins, we’d count squad wipes. We began playing much more aggressively, not caring as much about out gear, and going TOWARDS action instead of away from it. This led to less time “wasted” meaning if we died, we did so fast and early, and so wed get to the next game faster. If we won, we’d score gear off the players we just defeated.
Similarly, in Hunt we’d head towards the first firefight we could hear, and either get kills or get killed. Pretty much always playing free hunters with cheap loadouts we wouldn’t care about losing.
And never, ever, even considered caring about or grinding rank.
I play to maximize fun, not progress. I min/max for enjoyment, not stats. It’s one of the reasons I have chat entirely disabled in Overwatch, voice and text, because I don’t wanna hear it if someone is screaming at me over my pick. I don’t care. I here to have a good time.
This is the way. I play COD Mobile, mostly BR and there’s some areas on both BR maps where you know a lot of people is going to land so there’s where I go all the time. If I die, ok, just repeat.
Also, pretty cool you found a group of like minded people who don’t focus on the score but on the fun.
IKR. So often its “be at rank blank, or I wont play with you”.
I find that extraction shooters (especially dmz) really fill the gap perfectly.
You get the rush from extracting, you get to kill stuff, regardless of your skill level, but there is still super intense pvp.
Love it
BRs are a game type that sounds awesome to me on paper but I never end up actually enjoying. Too much time with nothing happening with it all to just abruptly end. It’s a cool idea I think. Just not for me
I’ve never played multiplayer games in my childhood (long story), and the first multiplayer I’ve really tried was PUBG Mobile. I’ve been hooked on it for about three years and made some online friends over it. when EA made Apex Legends available on Linux last year I’ve switched to it and clocked about 600 hours since then. I really enjoy the BR format, and even though I’ve never tried a competitive shooter like Counter Strike or Valorant (fuck their intrusive anticheat by the way), running exactly the same lines on the same map and constantly holding the same angles and hoping to just outreact the opponent by a milisecond doesn’t appeal to me.
It’s up to you ofc, but playing these kind of games always has been feeling frustrating since I turned 15 years ago lmao
I know it’s up to me. you asked what we think about battle royale games so I shared my opinion.
Most competitive games stresses me out. I have probably 1k hours in WoT and WoWS. I know I should be enjoying the small moments and not worry about winning as much, but I just can’t do it.
As much as i love driving my tanks, I couldn’t handle the wot gameplay. I just realised I get stressed instead of satisfied. Switched to PvE games, much better.
I think the problem is in your head, apex is a relaxing game for me. Not that I wouldn’t take it seriously but I don’t invest anything into it mentaly.
I don’t understand why br games always focus on being fast, that’s exactly the opposite of what I would want out of that experience. If I want a fast action game I can play any team death match, a br game is something that I want to get invested into my run to raise the stakes for the end.
In my mind, it’s because the game developers are catering to the “short attention span” gamers, which I think is a pretty large chunk. They want to get to “playing” fast and want that instant gratification.
In Apex Legends, there are hotspots where half the lobby drops, and you either are the one team out of four or five that comes out alive, or you die pretty immediately and have to queue up for the next game. It’s just a different style of playing, which I don’t fully understand.
But then again, I also don’t want to drop in the middle of nowhere and loot for 20 minutes. I want moderate-paced action; an initial fight with one or two teams, then slowly rotate around the map picking intelligent fights where we can.
I feel like as I get older, I prefer action games that reward strategic placement and high level decisions, rather than the precise millisecond actions.
Things like bunny hopping/sliding in Apex, lean spamming in R6S, etc, tend to make most shooters unappealing to me. Even a game like Deceive Inc has the general idea of stealthy strategy, but in the end all that matters is landing headshots.
Theoretically, this would mean I’d like “realistic” squad warfare FPSes, but those aren’t really aimed for fun. Mostly I’d like an arcadey shooter with movement abilities, but one that has you make decisions between offense, movement, defense; not spam multiple at once.
You could look into ‘Hunt Showdown’ it’s a slower pace br where the main objective is to track and hunt a monster on the map. Other teams (or solo players) are all tracking the same monster. There are times where you’re tracking the monster and end up having to fight a team instead. It’s a game that mixes PVE and PvP elements quite well.
The game focuses on weapons of different caliber bullets, bullet drop, awareness of sounds/audio queues, and bullets actually pack a punch. You’re not a bullet sponge.
I have awareness as that one, but same issue as Insurgency as I mentioned; people who try to engage with the enemies will give away their position to the incredibly idle players, who then have a strong surprise advantage since the swamp has so many places to hide.
It doesn’t help that I’ve heard the developers have a somewhat toxic relationship with their playerbase.
600ish hours in Hunt at this point, and while you can give away your position to the idle players, that only matters at the top end of the Matchmaking system where the “bush-wookies” lie. With the self-revive for solos trait that got added, it helped even the playing field a lot. Previously getting hit by a sniper was a game-over for solos while for a duo/trio it was the start of an encounter, with your teammates able to revive you after they kill or chase the sniper off. With self-revive you have a chance of popping up when they aren’t watching, or when they are pushing to your body from their perch, and either fighting or retreating.
Also I wouldn’t say the developers have a toxic relationship with the player base at all. They are constantly making fun changes to the game and adding in new features to change things up. They also test out new features during temporary events and see how people like them before implementing the into the game wholesale. And this is done via looking at gameplay statistics, not just listening to the very vocal subset of people who hate any change to the game.
I’d like to recommend Insurgency Sandstorm for you, as it sits right in the middle of CoD-like shooters and tactical, milsim shooters… but I have myself soured out of it a while ago due to how it’s handled by the devs that remained. I did have a fun time with Arma 3, but that required a group to make operations with, and 300GB of disk space for mods. Other kinds of action shooter games that could work are slower paced, vehicle or mech based games, but right now I can’t think of a single one that is well maintained and populated.
Part of why I like Deep Rock Galactic is that the traversal and objectives still require a constant level of critical thinking, even if it’s usually pretty simple. There is more going on than twitch reflex shooting. The guns feel good and the fact that it’s crowd control means you usually aren’t snap shooting but thinking about how to best control the enemies.
I personally stopped playing any multiplayer games. I don’t know what it started happening, but it feels like everything went from casual fun, to grindy bullshit and competitive sweatfest.
Maybe it’s just me, I put too much pressure on myself, but I know that it wasn’t there before. I used to be able to play without feeling this intense pressure of being good, because I didn’t want to be a burden for my team and didn’t want to be insulted by virulent players.
BR games were the worst for this. The longer you are alive, the more pressure builds up. Things could be going smoothly, you’re not crossing even one enemy, and all of the sudden: it’s just you and your friends, versus another team. You make one wrong move, and it’s over. It’s over, and it’s your fault. I can’t do that. I can’t handle the pressure of being responsible for this. Feeling like I’ve ruined and wasted their time.
I play to have fun. To relax. I was never getting angry. But my friends, they did. They were nice to me, we’re still friends after all, I wouldn’t have tolerated abuse. But I could tell, I wasn’t as good as them, and they hated losing when we were playing games. They would get angry, and the pressure of doing good was getting to me. It stopped being fun, and it didn’t used to be this way. So I stopped.
I only play single player games now. It’s been a really long time since I played online. Although, I sometimes think of going back to Titanfall 2, it is still one the greatest FPS ever made in my opinion, and I just adored it, I was really good at it too.
But yeah. I never get angry and rarely feel pressured now when playing a game and losing. No one is going to insult me, or berate me, and I am not dragging anyone down. If I do get angry, it is because some bullshit is happening. Like the game pulled a Mario Kart on me, and decided that I was going to lose because that’s the way it is I guess.
I feel like you made the right move. It shouldn’t be this way, it shouldn’t make you feel this bad, and if it is, then you should quit. It’s not your fault, it may even not be the game’s fault, it doesn’t have to be anyone’s or anything’s fault. If it’s just better for you, then do it.
I suggest to check out some single player games, there is a lot of them. Lots of variety. :)
Trackmania has you competing against yourself. It’s great for that competitive aspect without the sweatiness.
Overwatch 2 basically reminded me that there are single player games that you fully pay for one time and that range from as relaxing–intense as you’re in the mood for. Now I’m playing Stardew valley and Slay the spire while I’m watching TV and movies. If I feel like action, I’ll play more Yakuza
Casual multiplayer games still exist, but are pretty rare these days. Stuff like left 4 dead, minecraft survival, and halo minigame maps are all very casual. I would think VR multiplayer games are probably casual too but I never got into it lol
If you hate any social interaction with randoms at all tho, then I would still avoid those probably.
I can honestly go one step further and say I’m just tired of shooters. Unfortunately that seems to be all my friends want to play, so I typically just hang out in voice and chat instead of game with them nowadays.
