I'd genuinely love for a developer to step up and do a better milsim BR but so far PUBG is king in that niche.
PUBG doesn't have much special left, and its new peers haven't been very successful at unseating fortnite for popularity.
The building mechanic you dislike, seems to me to be a crucial ingredient that makes so many love it [0]. The continually evolving meta-game and diverse game modes also help elevate it above the chaff.
[0] At the time of writing, fornite has ~10x as many twitch viewers as pubg.
I beg to differ. It has a pretty arcadey gunplay (well... it's CoD). Nowhere near close to PUBG's ballistics. It's pretty much point and click. I can see the appeal, but it's not for me.
Calling it a milsim though...
> twitch has largely pivoted already..
At the time of writing PUBG has more viewers on Twitch.
> PUBG doesn't have much special left
Disagree. It's a niche, but one no game has been able to fill. Every single player I know that left for Blackout ended up coming back to PUBG. It's still its own kind of game.
> The building mechanic you dislike, seems to me to be a crucial ingredient that makes so many love it [0]. The continually evolving meta-game and diverse game modes also help elevate it above the chaff.
Mate, you don't have to defend Fortnite so vehemently. I know it's probably a great game, I just dislike it and no amount of talking will turn it into my type of game.
I hope Fortnite and PUBG will finally wake Apple up, I mean even Phill Schiller is playing Fortnite [1]. Gaming is driving the PC sales, Mac needs to take notes.
[1] https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/1077319181027004417
Background: I had undergone a major cervical spine fusion surgery to avoid becoming quadriplegic[1] & have been forced to close my startup which I have been running for ~ 5 years. I have been facing anxiety & panic attacks ~ 3 months after surgery.
I had decided to try gaming to aid with the recovery from panic attacks & also to monitor the dexterity of my fingers. I looked for multiplayer TPS games with some realism & accurate weapon mechanics. Fortnite was too colourful & lacked realistic maps (IMO); so I chose PUBG.
Initial game sessions made my anxiety worse, especially when a sniper takes you out (or) the impending threat of it. After several sessions, I've learnt to be calm & have improved my tactics.
I can definitely say that playing PUBG has definitely helped me recover from my anxiety & panic attacks. Of-course, this might have been the case even if I had played other games including Fornite; but as I said PUBG served my needs.
[1]: https://abishekmuthian.com/i-was-told-i-would-become-quadrip...
So glad I found someone else who also got help from games for their anxiety and panic attacks. I've also undergone some crappy health-related stuff this year and the only thing which I believe pulled me out of it and fixed my crippling anxiety while I recovered was Just Cause 3. I think it was the wingsuit flying coupled with the open-world exploration. It was basically the only activity which could bring my heart rate down to the 60s (It's very counter-intuitive, even for me, how a fast-paced game managed to calm me down) . Not even reading had this effect on me. My friends don't play games and I'm not social at all (twitch, xbox, etc..) so I'm very glad I see someone else in a similar situation.
Sounds great, BTW there was a reddit AMA from a therapist who researches the intersection of video games & mental health[1] the comments section includes several people who share similar experience as us.
I'm planning to try out JC3 for it's interesting game mechanics as you pointed out. One thing I noticed after getting hooked to PUBG was, story based gaming doesn't interest me anymore; I used to be an avid gamer before my entrepreneurial commitments, I would definitely finish the games.
Not sure if it is 'endless' nature of PUBG or similar games, which doesn't give the content of having finished a game; makes one hooked to them. I had got NieR:Automata for it's philosophical adventure, but I didn't get back to it since I touched PUBG.
P.S I wish good health for you in the coming years.
[1]:https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9jona3/i_am_a_therapi...
Being calm, breathing, mindfulness helped me.
They've been able to capture the realistic military style sim, but without the massive player overhead required to learn and be good at those games. The gun mechanics are some of, if not the best I've ever played.
Fortnite was pretty much a failure when it first launched. Sure they copied PUBG's last-man-standing game mode, but what really made it take off was that you didn't have to pay for the game.
You could get it, play it, and then upgrade or not upgrade your character as you desired. This is what made it so wildly popular with its base audience of 7-15 year olds. They can't drive, they don't have money, they might have hyper controlling parents that won't let them go out and be proper kids, but if they have a desktop and a reliable internet connection, they can be a part of this game. That's a big selling point for kids. Not to mention if they watch Twitch/Youtube, it would appear to be a potential career path for them to sit on their ass consuming content in an interesting way as they see people like Ninja and Muselk getting rich.
As for Fortnite's financial success, again I think this comes down to them ripping off Valve - principally Team Fortress 2. When Valve made the game free to play in 2011, they added other monetization mechanisms like premium cosmetics and taunts. This is exactly how Fortnite has become so huge.
Instead of having major entrance barriers like having to own a console or forking over $60 - $100 for a game. You can get it for free and maybe pay a few bucks here or there when it suits you. And parents love it because it gives them a passive way to control their kids at little to no cost. (Unless their the absurd type of people who pay for Fortnite tutors)
Not that Gabe Newell or Valve need the money, but Epic has ripped off almost everything from other games for Fortnite. With their massive budget they're basically like Facebook in that they can steal any concept to be produced in house and fight legal battles as necessary. And I think their success compared to what they've ripped off is largely a matter of timing with the rise of services like Twitch, Youtube and Discord than anything specific to their IP.
I think another major contributor to Fortnite’s success is the scale of cross-platform play that we’ve rarely seen before. Chances are if you have a thing that can connect to the internet, that thing is capable of running Fortnite.
They’re like Facebook not just because they have the money to steal any concept and build it in house, but because in some ways they are a social network. It’s as much as a game as a platform to hang out with your friends and chill.
I also agree about the social network angle, the one area Epic has really shined is their season and special event model. While other games have special events and it's really nothing new, the consistency with which Epic produces them creates a constant buzz around the product. Like rugrat water-cooler talk. And some of their events only last a day or two, so if you take a week off for a vacation, you may miss some major thing that your friends may be talking about for who knows how long. Granted this might be intentional addiction fostering aimed at kids by Epic.
Unreal Engine works on linux, and Fortnite used to work through wine, but because of their anti-cheating system it's broken now, and their CEO doesnt seem to have any plans for the linux version, he has some weird stance [1] on that.
Such a bummer, I really wanted to play it.
[1] https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/964284402741149698
TF2 or PUBG could've done this but didn't, fortnite did, and nailed it, and now we all get to benefit.
To begin with, comparing Fortnite to what Valve has been doing lately is a bit strange. Valve has recently focused less on being a developement company and more on their platform/marketplace (Steam) which is the primary driver of their success. Valve in the last few years has been for the most part fairly been irrelevant in the game development industry. A more apt comparison would be Epic and Bluehole (which both created the most popular Battle Royales).
You also state that that Fortnite was both a "failure when it first launched" and "what really made it take off was that you didn't have to pay for the game." Fortnite's Co-Op PvE ran an alpha back in 2014[0], and only entered Early Access in 2017[1] (which cost $40). By no metric was it a failure, and comparing the pre-free to play numbers to after it got popular (with a totally different gamemode) is unfair. Fortnite's free to play battle royale gamemode was not a failure and grew extremely quickly after it's release[2].
What made the game popular with its base audience (initially popular with adults and teenagers and only later being picked up by kids) was the fresh and unique take on a new genre (Battle Royale) that was extremely easy to pick up. It definitely wasn't that they could upgrade their character's cosmetics, a option available in basically every multiplayer. Fornite's financial success does come from selling cosmetics, but implying that cosmetics in video games was an idea developed by Valve is laughable. Sales of virtual goods in video games has a very long history[3].
Fortnite popularized (and capitalized on) a fresh genre, which combined with a low barrier to entry, revolutionized the gaming industry and generated immense wealth for Epic, which struck gold with the game. If it wasn't Fortnite, another well made Battle Royale could have easily overtaken the genre in a similar manner. Fortnite was simply in the right place, at the right time, with the right devs. And they've been rewarded handsomely for it.
[0] https://www.polygon.com/2014/12/1/7316937/fortnite-alpha-sig... [1] https://www.vg247.com/2017/07/21/fortnite-early-access-has-s... [2] https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/postmortem-of-... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_goods#History
This lead to all 3 games being laggy, which is quite bad for a shooter. It also lead to the pace of development slowing down to a crawl after a few months, which I assume was due to their spaghetti code being hard to work with.
Epic at least has experience with game engines and development, and have managed to keep up the pace and performance.
See you on Vikendi. Bring your snow jacket.
Definitely not. Bugs are not a common occurrence currently, while they were present in every single gaming session I had, even for the last year.
Give it a try, the game is in a great state.
I think the genius in PUBG can be found more in seeing the opportunity of creating a standalone realistic Battle Royale shooter at the right time.
I've been a fan of the "battlegrounds" gameplay mode since I played on Arma 2 Battle Royale servers back in 2012. I'm really glad they became mainstream enough for me to start sucking at them.
It's been a while since I tried it but I recall the mobile Fortnite having control options that let you turn off autofire. I'm also pretty sure that matchmaking between mobile and other platforms is opt-in [0]. You shouldn't be up against PC players when you're on your phone.
[0] https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/23/17146848/cross-platform-cr...
Wow, you're bitter. Are you talking about Brendan Greene or Chang-han Kim? They wanted to get the game out quickly and with a low budget, and they achieved just that! It's strange to be dissing individual creators of a very successful product in comparison to a big company like Epic games.
It means they deserve better than all the garbage that's been pushed out over the last 5 years or so since Unity and Unreal became free, and Steam relaxed its submission standards. There's been a massive wave of terrible "games" that people are just forced to accept because they don't know any better.
I'm not hating on indie game devs in general, there are of course plenty of amazing ones. But the real problem is this trend of a small group of devs forming a "studio", coming up with really ambitious plans for a huge game after learning Unity for a month, and then releasing early access garbage like PUBG and abandoning it when they realize making a triple-A game takes years of effort by a vast team of expert professionals.
On the other hand, I see no problem with him trying to profit from it either.
Edit: I correct myself -- in Invisible Man, the phrase was "battle royal," not "battle royale." It's still clearly similar however.
also this concept was a minecraft mod called hunger games before that even
PUBG succeeded and vastly popularized the BR genre but it definitely didn't invent it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_royale_game#Early_games...
While Battlegrounds was not the first battle royale game, its release to early access in March 2017 drew a great deal of attention, selling over twenty million units by the end of the year,[18][19] and is considered the defining game of the genre.That's what the grandparent was saying: Brandon Greene, the man mostly responsible for PUBG was also responsible for H1Z1 (SOE licensed the Battle Royale mode from him for H1Z1 and hired him as a consultant): https://www.pcgamer.com/battle-royale-modder-brendan-greene-...
(Tangentially, I'm still amazed at the variety of gameplay ideas people were testing in SCBW and W3's UMS maps).
Excuse me if I find that viewpoint to be very disrespectful to indie developers. I know there is a problem with "asset flippers", but you have to take the good with the bad. Open access is not a bad thing.
Indie devs are honest people just trying to express themselves. If anyone "deserves" anything, it's the indie dev to not be treated like shit by their customers. They don't make games with the intent of getting huge and annoying 1% of the self-identified "hardcore" gamers with their idiosyncrasies. They are just trying to do their best with the resources they have. Sometimes (rarely) they hit on a recipe that captures the zeitgeist and makes them grow way far out of control for what they are prepared for. That doesn't mean they deserve to be bitched at our told they are screwing their customers.