Battle Royales Are Exhilarating, But the Time Has Come for A Reformulation.

I am addicted to the video game “Call of Duty: Warzone”. This is not an exaggeration. I play every day, whenever I can, and if a friend asks me to hop online, I get cold sweats and my fingers twitch, and I am unable to say no. Never have I ever devoted more blood and sweat to a game than this one, so much so that I have experienced light bouts of PTSD whilst lying awake at night after a long, boozy session online – the awful sound of a stun grenade ringing in my ears, the shredding of a Mac-10, and the crushing soundbite that plays when you’re eliminated from a game.

But I, and millions of others, remain zealous Zonists, regardless of the hackers and the stupid bugs, and the ridiculously overpowered weapons, and the sadistically good players that shit all over you and your squad, because the highs make it all worth it. When you and your mates are rolling round the Russian city of Verdansk, and someone screams “STUN OUT”, and you lob a Molotov cocktail through a window and wipe the floor with the opposing team, there is no better feeling. As you stealthily move as a unit around the map, you feel as one. And finally, when the end game arrives and multiple teams are confined to a small space, you feel coked-up and alive. At school, I used to doze off in lessons and daydream about such scenarios – running round the campus, slamming doors open and shouting “TANGO DOWN” (let’s be clear, I imagined myself as an SAS-trained super soldier, not a psychopathic school shooter).

Warzone is a battle royale. This means many teams go head to head in an open-world, (a large-scale map offering great freedom to the player), but the open world in which you are playing gradually becomes smaller and smaller, until only one team can remain. For the sake of readers that already understand this concept, I will not attempt to explain any further. Rather, I will outline my issue with the archetypical battle royale, and how it could be reformulated.

What players love about this game mode are the endless opportunities it can throw up – after all, the map is huge and you’re free to go wherever. This is true, but only to a certain extent, because after a while you realise that staying at the edge of the closing zone becomes a major disadvantage, as you are being pushed from behind by the toxic gas, and pinned down by gatekeepers up ahead. The most effective strategy, and without a doubt the easiest, is to land in the centre of the zone and predict with relative ease where it will close. The other night I did this with two friends that barely know how to work the controls, and we were able to camp at the top of a stairwell for the whole game and finish second. This is entirely not within the spirit of the game, and camping is heavily frowned upon, but it proves that there exists a flaw in the concept. ‘Paris Legion’, who are a pro-team, won £10,000 at a tournament using this exact same strategy, whilst the other pro-teams quickly picked each other off and struggled to find spots in the closing zone to hold. The winning team remained prone in the building, with their guns trained on the entrance points, for practically the whole game, effectively rendering the rest of the map and the toxic gas useless.

So, whilst I have conducted very little research on the history of battle royales and advise Activison to take my thoughts with a pinch of salt, I think that the closing zone should take a more unpredictable turn, perhaps by opening up the play area to a part of the map that has already succumbed to the gas. Transportation round the map, via an abundance of overpowered vehicles, should also be more difficult than it currently is. In my view, this would improve the dynamic of the gameplay and force players to remain on their toes, rather than in a dark corner of an 18-storey apartment block, waiting for some unfortunate soul to be obliterated by their proximity mine.