“There’s a sweet spot where it’s fun and performs well for everybody, and we get there by lots of playtests and lots of analysing data in the field,” he explains. In PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, settlements are spaced out to ensure players keep moving. “Also, you don’t want five or six cities crowded together or you can run into too many assets loading at once.” “If you put cities too close together, players aren’t incentivised to leave, but put them too far apart and players get bored of the journey in between,” he says. Everything is driven by a combination of design and technical considerations.
He’s been designing first-person shooter maps for years, and the first thing he says about the layout of battle royale landscapes is that there’s never anything accidental about the way that towns and other scenic features are dispersed. But what makes them so compelling? Why is a generation of kids is probably more comfortable navigating from Tilted Towers to Paradise Palms than they are from home to the shops?ĭave Curd is the world art director on PUBG. The islands are scattered with towns, villages, and industrial complexes, they all have rivers and bridges and offshore isles and they’re all roughly the same shape.
Within a week, it had gathered 10 million players, rocket-boosting publisher Electronic Arts’ share value.Įven though the visual styles and narrative settings of these games are very different, the four giants of the genre adhere to a strict set of conventions. Last October, Activision added a battle royale mode named Blackout to Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and on 4 February, Respawn Entertainment launched Apex: Legends. The following year, the game earned $2.4bn from players’ purchases.
Noticing this success, Epic Games released a free battle royale version of its online co-op game Fortnite, offering a cartoony visual style and a Minecraft-style construction element. PUBG was launched as a beta in early 2017 and by December, it had 30 million players.
Its popularity caught the attention of Korean developer Bluehole, who employed Greene to oversee development of a full game. The current craze started with Day Z: Battle Royale, a modification of the zombie survival game DayZ developed by lone designer Brendan Greene, later updated as PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale. This is of course battle royale, a new type of online shooting game currently being enjoyed by over 200 million people across the globe. As the match progresses, the playable area contracts, forcing the competitors closer together. For the next 20 minutes they must search buildings for useful weapons and equipment, before fighting to the death. A group of people drop on to a large island.