June 2018

People keep asking me, if I will make a Battle Royale game mode for Uebergame, because it is so popular now, but I always found it boring and retarded.

My first encounter with this game was on some streaming website, where I watched it out of curiosity, since suddenly everyone was playing it. So I watched a guy walking alone through the wilderness, well you cannot really call it wilderness, it is more like a desert with an occasional tree planted randomly here and there, but he was walking around alone doing nothing for like half an hour or so. Occasionally he would pick up items and he also found a car, he got in then he drove around alone doing nothing else, then he ran himself over with his car through some glitch or so and was instantly dead without having started playing and lost all his stuff that he collected. After that he did the same again, but that time he was not fully dead, only 80% dead, so he used up all his medpacks he collected to heal himself from running himself over. Then I shut the stream off, since it was too boring, I just wasted half an hour or more of my life watching a guy walking around and killing himself and I thought to myself "Is this really the new thing now? Is this what gaming is about now?", well most likely I picked up a bad stream, but still not that great of a concept.

Regarding that I remember watching some documentary about game design and the guy there said, that the future of game design will be games that consist mostly of players just walking from A to B and he said, people will love it. It seems his prediction got fullfilled once more with this Battle Royale game that consists mostly of running around from A to B and people love watching it.

I really cannot understand all this hype, people try to argue how fun and innovative it is, but I still don't get it, lets analyze the innovative part. Battle Royale is basically the "last man standing" game mode, where death is permanent until everyone except one person is still alive and the last person alive is the winner. It existed almost as long as there existed 3D shooters, but it was always one of the most, if not the most unpopular game mode for obvious reasons, I mean think about it, everyone has to wait until everyone was dead, so you end up waiting most of the time instead of getting the action. You wait till you meet other players or wait hiding, since that was the best tactic to survive longer and when you were dead, you had to wait until everyone else was dead also, which could take a long time. The current Battle Royale games solved that problem partly by just joining another game, but the exiting and joining process takes time again and then you have warmup phase, running around phase, collecting gear etc. The other part people claim is so innovative is that you start naked without clothes or weapons, well this also existed in 3D shooters as long as you can imagine (if you ignore the clothes part), you could just remove the starting weapons, but this was retarded also for obvious reasons and nobody did play that way, it is not a fair game, if you have no chance to defend yourself. It is kind of perverted to like to beat a defenseless enemy, I mean there is no honor in that and also not fun.

So I start to seriously questioning the sanity of humanity, how can something that was the most unpopular in the past that nobody played, become the most popular that almost everyone is playing? I mean it is not that it is new or innovative, I even knew a guy over 15 years ago who build a mod or level based on the same Battle Royale movie intenting to have the same gameplay as in the movie and of course nobody played it. So if this game mode is so fun and innovative, it would have at least catched some people.

Next part for me was researching into marketing tactics and human psychology and to make it short, I found that popularity is all manufactured and most people have no ability at all to determine, if a product is good quality and fun to use or not. As long as it looks popular everyone jumps on and what is popular is decided by streamers, youtubers, PC magazines etc and most of them are bribed, which I don't have the money for. I mean I also had to play games I hated that were "popular" as a child to get accepted by my "friends" and to have someone to play with, at that time it was Counter-Strike, sure it was not that bad compared to alternatives at that time, but it was not what I really liked.

I even watched that Battle Royale movie all that stuff now is based on and found it very weird and perverted, I thought typical japanese stuff, they are all crazy, no sane human would tolerate such a future where school children are forced to kill each other on a remote island, because overpopulation and bla bla. Seems I was proven wrong and this pervert trend entered into our civilized western world now.

So the question I have to ask myself all the time is: "Will I become corrupt, go with the masses, go with the degeneration, deny my own ideals and become popular as a result or stay true and stay unpopular?" So far the answer was always obvious to me...

PS: Maybe I'm just too lazy to build it, but if someone wants to help building it I can integrate it, since hey Uebergame is open source and development is democratic and stuff.