CHENNAI : The origin of Battle Royale can be traced as far back as co-operative gaming. The gaming clans that stemmed from those multiplayer games had a common purpose of enemy destruction, which felt so elite and cool. It’s possible that the shrinking forcefield idea was popularised in Hunger Games inspired Battle Royale. The preferred violent mode of battle was a no-brainer. Victory was acknowledged only if you were the last one in the battlefield.
It seemed as though the game developers had found the perfect path to success. When PUBG and Fortnite came out with their different versions of the fabled shrinking field, millions flocked towards them. Concurrent gaming was at its highest. But then there were those to whom the holy two of Battle Royale was inaccessible. Either the whole world agrees, or it finds another way. The developers devised an alternate path, a tiny distributary of wannabe PUBG with poorer graphics and a ‘Pochinok’ - the technologically less-privileged person’s ‘Pochinki’.
Suddenly, there was chaos. The ‘Pochinoks’ increased in number. What were they thinking? That people would move away from the great two? That new players would rather land at the Pochinok? I was foolish enough to stumble on to one myself - ‘Creative Destruction’ sounded like a new pacifist Battle Royale, where you construct instead of destroying the enemy. While the large file installed in my phone, I imagined a cool battle arena where I’d collect equipment instead of ammunition, and construct walls within the force-field instead of destroying my opponents.
CD was conscientious enough to show me an unasked tutorial to the game - something that neither PUBG or Fortnite ever did. I saw the destructor, and the constructor devices and was optimistic about the game. But CD (still not as catchy as PUBG) was just an accessible Fortnite - full with a similar map and the cartoony RPG7. Since Fortnite is not yet accessible to the larger non-console audience - CD looks like a neat replacement.The Battle Royale genre is getting heavily diluted. It is now so in the mainstream that I’m starting to feel I should jump ship. Let’s hope the path of developer logic leads us to cooler new parodies like ‘Cuisine Royale’ and the likes.