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A group of people settle on a big island. For the next 20 minutes, they must search the buildings for weapons and useful equipment before fighting to death. As the match progresses, the play area contracts, forcing competitors to come closer. The last person standing wins.
This is of course Battle Royale, a new type of online shooter used by more than 200 million people around the world. The craze began with Battlegrounds, a modification of the DayZ zombie survival game developed by solitaire designer Brendan Greene. His popularity drew the attention of Korean developer Bluehole, who employed Greene to oversee the development of a complete game. PUBG was launched in beta early 2017 and in December it had 30 million players.
Noting this success, Epic Games released a free Battle Royale version of its Fortnite online cooperation game, featuring a visual mapping style and a Minecraft-style building element. It was in September 2017. The following year, the game was worth $ 2.4 billion to players' purchases. Last October, Activision added a royal battle mode called Blackout to Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and on February 4, Respawn Entertainment launched Apex: Legends. In a week, he had gathered 10 million players, worth in the share of Electronic Arts publisher.
Although the visual styles and narrative parameters of these games are very different, the four giants of the genre adhere to a set of strict conventions. The islands are dotted with towns, villages and industrial complexes, they all have rivers, bridges and islands off the coast and they all have about the same shape. But what makes them so convincing? Why is a generation of children probably more comfortable navigating sloped towers to the Paradise Palms than from home to stores?
Dave Curd is artistic director on PUBG. He's been drawing first-person shooter charts for years, and the first thing he says about the landscape layout of the Royal Battle is that there's never anything accidental about how the cities and other landscapes are scattered. Everything is motivated by a combination of technical considerations and design. "If you move cities closer together, players are not encouraged to leave, but too far apart and players are tired of the trip between the two," he said. "In addition, you do not want five or six cities to be crammed or you can have too much load of assets at the same time."
"It's a great place to have fun and play well for everyone, and we're doing it with lots of gaming tests and lots of field data analysis," he says. "On each card, you'll notice that art improves a bit and that the assets are a bit more scattered – we're still learning."
David Vonderhaar is the director of studio design at Treyarch, the veteran developer of Call of Duty at the origin of the new Blackout mode. When his team decided to create a map of the Royal Battle, they first tried to use their experience of traditional first-person shooters, but that's a mistake. "Many of the multiplayer card instructions had to be rewritten or deleted," he said. "Some things like defining a structure, entry / exit requirements need to be changed and updated … We had to spend a lot of time at the beginning of development by carefully describing the variety and locations of the destinations on the map. , as well as their relationship with another. "
Battle Royales cards provide many liminal spaces between intense combat zones, and it is essential to manage the transition of players around the map, especially the entry and exit of important areas. "We wanted variety so that aggression or leaks [an area] is special, "says Vonderhaar. "The topography made it possible to achieve this goal. Sometimes, the destinations are ascended (Asylum), in the middle of a dense forest (The Hind Clearing) or require to cross a flat and exposed ground (Cargo). In a type of game in which players create their own stories, arriving at a given location – or evacuating it quickly – are important elements.
Some stage elements appear repeatedly because they are useful for creating specific player experiences, which is usually difficult in a large open space. "One of the big challenges of designing a royal battle card is that players can approach in any direction, including landing in the middle," he said. declared Curd. "So we used areas such as small islands and long bridges to create bottlenecks and stress points and to intentionally encourage certain types of play. In these small areas, we have a very good idea the way people will interact. It's quite fun for the players to camp a bridge, to feel clever, to feel like highwaymen. "
Another essential design element is the use of tall architectural structures such as poles and towers. Part of this is adding verticality to the playing space, which gave the impetus behind Blackout's dominant construction site, with its unfinished skyscraper. However, we must also help players to know where they are.
"These maps are actually 90% natural and 10% architectural, so it must stand out, it must break the horizon line," says Curd. "Using vertical architecture as a navigation point is crucial – we need to set a benchmark so that players inherently understand where they are relative to each other. You must see it from 2 km to know where you are going. Tall or unique structures act as very natural markers. This means that players should not keep shouting: "He's out there in the trees."
What's fascinating is how Battle Royale card designers use subtle environmental baits to get players to explore and move. "We use heaps of blankets as small safety zones to tempt players," Curd said. "Whether it's your typical crate or barrel, an old overturned truck, a long wall or a small shack, you'd be surprised at how much you can influence the player with the intelligent placement of loot and remote coverage. Players can calculate the risk and profits as follows: "OK, I will be exposed for a few seconds, but then I will have access to five new buildings. Buildings are the price because they have loot, but more importantly, they have windows on which I can see. & # 39;
Vondehaar agrees: "We never want the player to feel like they're not going up, because there's nothing to do. If you had to take a rule between two destinations in Black-out, you would see what we think is our focus. "
Environmental storytelling is also important to maintain the interest of the players. Epic Games has excelled in this area with Fortnite, creating its own mythology through falling meteors, mysterious hatches, intriguing posters, and television screens featuring images alluding to new game features. The landscape is constantly evolving and players love to speculate on what all this means.
In a more subtle way, Royal Battle Games rely on scenic features to give a glimpse of a sense of history. "We use low-level items, such as wear and tear on objects, to suggest that these places are abandoned or that occupants have left in a hurry," says Curt. "We can also be clearer: on the map of Sanhok, there are training places where you will find clues that it could be a training center for true Royal Battle fighters. We do not want to hit the player over the head with a story, but we leave clues to break the bread gently. "
All the successful titles of the royal battle know the importance of subtlety. Whether you're exploring the Haunted Hills crypts or the metallic hydro-dam corridors in Apex Legends, you will not find complex floor plans on multiple levels, or bulky furniture – all buildings are rather square. and the rooms rather empty. This is partly to ensure that players can quickly find useful objects among purely decorative objects, but it is also a gameplay. "You want relatively simple interiors so that players can effectively use the audition," Curd said. "They must be able to know that the other player is upstairs, they are downstairs, they are just outside. If we make our structures too complex, it would be very difficult to play. Sound is a big problem and our simple approach to interior design reflects that. "
As with any "live" game that is played out for thousands or even millions, iteration leads the design process. "We play rigorous tests," Curd said. "It's literally like designing a huge first-person shooter. We have the same design principles: fun drives decisions. If we try something, it does not matter how cool it looks, no matter what we think we want, if the game tests do not prove it, it makes the send. "
Iterating on the studio's own ideas is only part of the process – a successful Royal Battle developer must also understand the diverse needs of potential players. An important part of this process is to categorize them – run fanatics, explorers, snipers – and then make sure there are areas for each of them. "When you play a game as popular as ours, you have to realize that they will not be all the typical high-conflict SPF players, especially in our Asian markets," Curd says. "We have a significant number of players who appreciate the survival aspect: loot, hide, sneak. Some players do not even use guns. They like the tactic of hiding and foiling other players and reaching the next circle.
"I am an SMG player and shotgun, so I will always make sure that there is something for people who love close combat. But we know we have a lot of expert snipers. So we want less leafy areas, difficult terrain, so you can really see these numbers against the bright orange sun. If you go to a city and there is a big building with lots of windows, we want the players to feel this stress: "Does anyone look at me?"
Curd traces the lineage of this design approach to an unexpected source. "With Dark Souls, people were excited about the difficulty and the opacity," he says. "This proved that there was an appetite for opacity in the design, not to distribute information as directly to the players. The kind of royal battle proved that players can tolerate very stressful situations, really opaque choices and not always know the clearest way to play. "
The studios use maps not only as interesting combinations of rural and urban areas, but also for narration of narratives, as supports for the stories created by the players. Buildings are used to hide objects, but they are also navigation tools. bridges provide access but also choke points to encourage shots on goal. Players do not know anything about it. They must learn to read and understand a royal battle environment, such as a hiker picking subtle clues of local vegetation, stream flow, or hedge direction. The worlds are open and free to move – nothing is directed. And the unpredictable interactions between these freedom and direction systems are as entertaining to watch as they are to play – a valuable asset in the era of Twitch streamers and YouTube superstars.
"Whenever you ask anyone about his first win, I guarantee you that he has a little story about how he got there," Curd says. "These games are high stakes, high dangers, high challenge, and super satisfying … we want to be tested. We want to be pushed. "
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