Over the past few months, Fortnite and PUBG have become ridiculously popular. I don't like either of them, but it has made me think a little bit about why certain games are being developed and why they become so popular.
PUBG was created by a guy who made the battle royale mod for Arma 3. I would argue that the BR mod is probably a better game because Arma is basically nothing but a high quality military simulator and PUBG seems kind of arcade-like and unpolished in comparison. So, having been aware of that mod for some time, it was kind of bizarre to see how quickly PUBG became so popular.
You have 100 players in every match. Why have we not had a very popular team multiplayer shooter that is on that scale? There is Arma, but nobody plays it because it's way too in depth. Battlefield was kind of getting there with Battlefield 3, but they never really pushed it any further with the games that came after it. To me this just seems like the natural progression of multiplayer shooters.
We started out with arena shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament, then we had Counter Strike, Halo, Call of Duty and Battlefield and it just seemed to stagnate at that point. Competitive RTS also had this sort of golden period before it stopped offering anything new and declined in popularity. It seems strange to say this now, but to me the new Star Wars Battlefront games are the two games that could have really nailed this massive FPS idea, because the old games really had that feel of a mass scale all out war even though it was single player. Instead, they fucked it up.
I really hope that when this battle royale craze dies down, we will see a few of these games. I think it is definitely possible. There are MMO games like EVE that are absolutely huge, but every now and then the players manage to pull off some massive gathering within the game, and it just makes me think that this kind of multiplayer cohesion is something that can definitely translate to FPS if its done well.
My one critique of this post is the assumption that "realistic" means "better." More complex, sure, but I personally find CoD to be a snore because it's too realistic and therefore too slow, I couldn't imagine how slow ARMA is (I've heard it compared to fishing, short bursts of action interspersed with long bits of talking with buddies.) Realistic, pseudo-realistic, and non-realistic are three different markets, really.
Really I hope the FPS industry stops chasing trends altogether. Everyone was trying to do WWII, then everyone was trying to do modern war, then everyone was trying to do future shooters, and then it was cartoony character shooters (I still want a non-team-focused character shooter,) now it's Battle Royale games. We don't need 30 versions of the same thing on the market, we need more FPSes that bring something new to the table.