GTA Online now has an Adversary mode that pits players against each other in an ever-decreasing playzone. You parachute in, you scavenge for weapons, then you plug anyone who comes across your path, using whatever means necessary to survive. Sound familiar?
Fight for your life in our list of the best survival games.
Rockstar are clearly banking on the success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. I mean, it makes sense for them – parachuting, vehicles, and guns are already key to their game – but it got us thinking: what other games would benefit from a battle royale mode? Here are our completely sensible suggestions.
Dark Souls 3
It’s time to get looty in Lothric. Dark Souls PvP expanded as the series went on. In fact, Dark Souls 3 already features a dedicated arena where you can plonk down your gang sign (they’re totally called that, shut up) and materialise inside someone else’s world, ready for battle. It’s time to crank that up.
Let’s drop 100 players into its vast, interconnected world, each one of them completely naked, weaponless, and at Soul Level One. Weapons, estus flasks, and gear will be strewn around randomly, and you can only level up by killing another player. Grab a Young White Branch and turn into a pot. Watch as everyone slowly loses their humanity.
Oh, and there’s also voice chat. Imagine 100 people all screaming “git gud, scrub” in unison. Heaven. If only I could be so grossly incandescent.
No Man’s Sky
At launch, Hello Games came under fire because No Man’s Sky didn’t actually feature multiplayer, despite comments from the lead developer that suggested otherwise. Because of that backlash, Hello Games should give us what we want in the form of an intergalactic battle royale.
Drop 100 players off on random planets in its infinite, procedural galaxy. Don’t even give us a ship. Let each of us build a ship over several hours, then let us scour millions of planets in the vain hope that we might actually see another person. Little do we know, however, that we’re actually all alone anyway, and there’s still no multiplayer at all. Haha! Take that, space geeks. The winner is the last person to log off out of boredom.
FIFA 18
We all know football is boring stuff for ball nerds, so let’s spice it up with some murder, yeah? Footbattle Royale, as the mode will obviously be called, will take its cue from Cannon Soccer, the Cannon Fodder/Sensible Soccer mashup released as an Amiga Format cover disk in 1993. In our version, all 22 players and the ref will be pitted against each other in a bloody fight to the death. The weapon? A football with spikes stuck through it. You can only use your feet – we’re not savages.
Random landmines will be dotted around the pitch. You can use these tactically, tapping a through ball between a group of disgustingly rich athletes and blowing them into meaty chunks. The playing field will slowly decrease, until eventually you’re all cramped inside a goal, kicking a spiked ball into each other’s faces.
The Sims 4
The Sims 4: Pay Gap brings The Sims to 2018. It’s the same game about self-improvement you know and love, but it sees 100 players start out in a one-bedroom flat, all in the same server. There are only five jobs. Get ahead of the competition by creating a mediocre dude.
See how much money you can hoard, then use it to buy up all the properties and price other players out of a house. The player who wins is the one who gains the most job promotions for the least amount of effort, grows old, then tells everyone they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
Tetris
How do you make Tetris relevant again? By turning it into a fast-paced battle royale, obviously. Every player is a block and they have to parachute into the grid. You kill other players by filling a line and defeating them.
You have to tuck and shift yourself around as you fall, landing in the most awkward position possible, making it hard for the next player to delete you. Imagine Tetris, but not old and rubbish.
Gone Home
Gone Home is great and everything, but it’s missing one crucial element of videogame design: guns. Massive guns. Make some DLC, outsource it to id Software, fill that abandoned house with the cries of other players, and swap out the ‘90s nostalgia for weapons – both the ones in voice chat, and those scattered across the ground.
If you came home after a long hiatus and all your family was gone, you’d want revenge on whoever took them, right? Even it it turned out they took themselves. How dare they? Give us that realism, the authenticity, and brutal violence that makes games special. I don’t want to read my dad’s letters – I want to shoot people who I catch reading my dad’s letters. That’s what it means to be a videogamer.
Total War
Just imagine it. One hundred commanders waging war with 20-stack armies in a vast theatre of strategy, noble sacrifice, and loot boxes. Trebuchet launches would replace cargo planes or balloon-borne buses, units could be discovered and recruited to bolster your force (lesser swordsmen discarded like the unfortunates that they are), all while a deadly perimeter drives the strongest players to a final standoff.
It sounds amazing, sure, but why take our word for it? Here’s what Creative Assembly has to say about the project.
This feature was originally published on August 31, 2017. Read more about PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.