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I think for me, the main frustration is the way those games are structured. You run around for a few minutes and when you finally have decent equipment, someone shoots you out of nowhere and you get kicked out, have to requeue and start over again.
On the other hand, when I die in Overwatch, Valorant, Counter Strike, Quake, Unreal Tournament (yes, I'm old...) I know that I'll be back in the action in a few seconds, I didn't lose much progress and I can still win this.
Not hating on people who like and enjoy PvP games, but to me it feels like it's a good way for a developer to make a game that doesn't actually have that much substance. Lacking content? Nothing to actually do in the game? NPCs are difficult to make interesting to fight? Just have players shoot each other. It's basically content that creates itself, not to mention (if you have good matchmaking) the difficulty ramps up naturally without you having to write better enemy AI.
I just want to fight stuff alongside other people, rather than potentially making another person's day just a little worse because I shot them before they shot me, you know? Is that too much to ask?
Dev difficulties are still there and not the same. Don't understimate netcode, or just simply gun feel, balancing, map design, sound design. Those are very difficult to get right even if you do not have to write a story or code NPCs. Each games have different challenges.
You have a point about less content development time. But don't underestimate the complexity of getting the netcode right and balancing the PVP system.
It's more like trading one set of problems for another, than it is a cop-out.
Plenty of games that lack substance in any category.
You need cozy game time. It’s not good to add a lot of stress in the pursuit of entertainment! If it doesn’t bring you joy it’s not worth your time. I’m looking at you, League of Legends.
Agreed. At one point, I just quit all royale-type games, because there was enough stress in my life; especially when I worked on a computer all day. I needed a break from it; the smart move would have been playing an IRL sport of some kind, but I eluded that once again, and instead joined a modded Rust PvE server where I just run around the forest and chase chickens. That worked.
Yeah, online competitive games just feel like I'm sitting an exam nowadays. I can do without the stress.
Also it feels like you spend ages running around in an empty field with nothing happening interspersed with seconds of not that great shooting gameplay
I feel the same about PvP in games in general. I just wanna vibe, maybe hang out with friends, and the sweat that comes from going against other people actively detracts from that.
Yeah, these games are fun and novel when you first start, but once you get even a little bit competitive at them they just become a chore. You have to constantly keep up with the meta, and constantly be playing to stay practiced. I guess that must appeal to some people, but the better I get at these games, the less fun I tend to have.
I stopped playing any game that makes me rage, because my dogs react as if I'm angry with them - since it's just me and them in the room, obviously I must be mad with them.
Had this exact problem with my cat, didn't rage-rage (slamming desk/mouse/keyboard have never been my thing) but I became irritated and she picked up on it. Her reaction was biting my hands, which took me too long to realise that it was a form to get me off the keyboard.
I switched from PC to console/playstation and I'm more chill playing in the couch, it doesn't get me irritated and it's just an all around more relaxing experience, the competitive scene especially on PC can be very toxic.
Cat stopped biting me, which is a huge plus also, because that little lovely shit really can bite hard.
I don't understand why br games always focus on being fast, that's exactly the opposite of what I would want out of that experience. If I want a fast action game I can play any team death match, a br game is something that I want to get invested into my run to raise the stakes for the end.
In my mind, it's because the game developers are catering to the "short attention span" gamers, which I think is a pretty large chunk. They want to get to "playing" fast and want that instant gratification.
In Apex Legends, there are hotspots where half the lobby drops, and you either are the one team out of four or five that comes out alive, or you die pretty immediately and have to queue up for the next game. It's just a different style of playing, which I don't fully understand.
But then again, I also don't want to drop in the middle of nowhere and loot for 20 minutes. I want moderate-paced action; an initial fight with one or two teams, then slowly rotate around the map picking intelligent fights where we can.
I personally stopped playing any multiplayer games. I don't know what it started happening, but it feels like everything went from casual fun, to grindy bullshit and competitive sweatfest.
Maybe it's just me, I put too much pressure on myself, but I know that it wasn't there before. I used to be able to play without feeling this intense pressure of being good, because I didn't want to be a burden for my team and didn't want to be insulted by virulent players.
BR games were the worst for this. The longer you are alive, the more pressure builds up. Things could be going smoothly, you're not crossing even one enemy, and all of the sudden: it's just you and your friends, versus another team. You make one wrong move, and it's over. It's over, and it's your fault. I can't do that. I can't handle the pressure of being responsible for this. Feeling like I've ruined and wasted their time.
I play to have fun. To relax. I was never getting angry. But my friends, they did. They were nice to me, we're still friends after all, I wouldn't have tolerated abuse. But I could tell, I wasn't as good as them, and they hated losing when we were playing games. They would get angry, and the pressure of doing good was getting to me. It stopped being fun, and it didn't used to be this way. So I stopped.
I only play single player games now. It's been a really long time since I played online. Although, I sometimes think of going back to Titanfall 2, it is still one the greatest FPS ever made in my opinion, and I just adored it, I was really good at it too.
But yeah. I never get angry and rarely feel pressured now when playing a game and losing. No one is going to insult me, or berate me, and I am not dragging anyone down. If I do get angry, it is because some bullshit is happening. Like the game pulled a Mario Kart on me, and decided that I was going to lose because that's the way it is I guess.
I feel like you made the right move. It shouldn't be this way, it shouldn't make you feel this bad, and if it is, then you should quit. It's not your fault, it may even not be the game's fault, it doesn't have to be anyone's or anything's fault. If it's just better for you, then do it.
I suggest to check out some single player games, there is a lot of them. Lots of variety. :)
Overwatch 2 basically reminded me that there are single player games that are fully paid for one time and that range from as relaxing--intense as you're in the mood for. Now I'm playing Stardew valley and Slay the spire while I'm watching TV and movies in my downtime
BRs are a game type that sounds awesome to me on paper but I never end up actually enjoying. Too much time with nothing happening with it all to just abruptly end. It's a cool idea I think. Just not for me
I've also never liked BR games. Too often it felt like you run around for minutes, looting stuff and nothing happens.
Then you see somebody and kill them without them noticing you. Or.. you get killed the exact same way.
Or when playing with friends. Like Apex, you get into fights with other teams, which is cool, but then third party comes in and owns you from behind.
Then it's over and you've to do everything all over again, running around looting etc.
Or you decide to drop in places where many players drop too. Then you have stupid fist fights or pistole fights. If unlucky, queue again and do it all over again.
This is more annoying than anything else. I prefer joining a fair 5v5 fight on a map where I respawn and keep going. Or real TDM/DM.
I think BR games have too much of a luck factor attached to it compared to oldschool real FPS games like CS, UT, Quake and all that. And I think that exactly is rage inducing.
Most competitive games stresses me out. I have probably 1k hours in WoT and WoWS. I know I should be enjoying the small moments and not worry about winning as much, but I just can't do it.
That's just kind of how I ended up being with anything competitive honestly, especially if it's a huge time sink, which battle royale games tend to be. Even CSGO's "Danger Zone" mode can take like half an hour with just 18 people.
I've found myself missing some of the older shooters I played as a teen like Black Ops II, MW2, Battlefield 3, etc. They're still "competitive" in a sense, but you're not playing for nearly as much as you are in Apex Legends or Fortnite. Plus the matches aren't overly long and you can rejoin the action in seconds depending on the mode. And if you leave a deathmatch, you aren't really losing a whole lot of progress. Pretty much 5 - 10 minutes worth as opposed to 30 minutes to an hour sometimes.
I've never played multiplayer games in my childhood (long story), and the first multiplayer I've really tried was PUBG Mobile. I've been hooked on it for about three years and made some online friends over it. when EA made Apex Legends available on Linux last year I've switched to it and clocked about 600 hours since then. I really enjoy the BR format, and even though I've never tried a competitive shooter like Counter Strike or Valorant (fuck their intrusive anticheat by the way), running exactly the same lines on the same map and constantly holding the same angles and hoping to just outreact the opponent by a milisecond doesn't appeal to me.
I can honestly go one step further and say I'm just tired of shooters. Unfortunately that seems to be all my friends want to play, so I typically just hang out in voice and chat instead of game with them nowadays.
I played Tarkov for a solid 3 or 4 months. The game itself is beautiful and raw. It's got the best weapon modification system I've ever seen. The sounds are top tier, especially when you consider the realistic differences the headsets to muffle or amplify sounds.
The downfall is the other players. The net code sucks so bad and the cheaters are rampant. The game suffers a lot for this. The reason most battle royals have high TTK is because losing instantly to someone is a terrible feeling, so to prevent this you have a ton of health and shields to at least give you a fighting chance.
Tarkov doesn't give a shit about that. You can spend 15 mins putting your kit together and loading into a raid just to be one tapped by a rat with a mosin shooting SNB. All that work into putting your kit together is wasted and now you've just donated your kit to wherever loots your body.
The SPTarkov mod is the greatest thing to ever happen to Tarkov because it got rid of the worst part of it: the other players.
I play pretty much everything. Some of my friends rage quit stuff when Im still 100% calm.
When it comes to BRs specifically, they can be very frustrating. Your winrate is inevitably low, due to there only being “one” winner per match, still me and my friends enjoy both Apex and Hunt: Showdown.
In both cases we started having a lot more fun when we started taking the games much less seriously, and not caring about whether the game told us we won.
In Apex, instead of wins, we’d count squad wipes. We began playing much more aggressively, not caring as much about out gear, and going TOWARDS action instead of away from it. This led to less time “wasted” meaning if we died, we did so fast and early, and so wed get to the next game faster. If we won, we’d score gear off the players we just defeated.
Similarly, in Hunt we’d head towards the first firefight we could hear, and either get kills or get killed. Pretty much always playing free hunters with cheap loadouts we wouldn’t care about losing.
And never, ever, even considered caring about or grinding rank.
I play to maximize fun, not progress. I min/max for enjoyment, not stats. It’s one of the reasons I have chat entirely disabled in Overwatch, voice and text, because I don’t wanna hear it if someone is screaming at me over my pick. I don’t care. I here to have a good time.
I think BRs are fine, I'm just glad that the market has moved away from the BR mania that it was once in. BRs intrinsically need a large player base to succeed and it was exhausting hearing about this "sick new BR" only for it to shut down 6-8 months later
I feel like as I get older, I prefer action games that reward strategic placement and high level decisions, rather than the precise millisecond actions.
Things like bunny hopping/sliding in Apex, lean spamming in R6S, etc, tend to make most shooters unappealing to me. Even a game like Deceive Inc has the general idea of stealthy strategy, but in the end all that matters is landing headshots.
Theoretically, this would mean I’d like “realistic” squad warfare FPSes, but those aren’t really aimed for fun. Mostly I’d like an arcadey shooter with movement abilities, but one that has you make decisions between offense, movement, defense; not spam multiple at once.
I haven't played any game with PvP in like a decade. I think WoW turned me off from them.
Same man. I realized at some point that I wasn't having fun playing pvp. I was stressed and when I'd stop playing I'd be in a bad mood even if I had been winning/playing well. I rarely play multiplayer games at all now, single player is my lane and I'm happy to stay in it. I'll venture out for some coop sometimes but mostly I'm good flying solo.
For me it's more the fact that if you don't play almost everyday, you get absolutely destroyed by people who do.
I've been unwillingly playing Fortnite for the last two years. I like competitive gaming with friends but big map BR games are just so boring for about 90% of the time you play them. Just soooo much running around. I consider time spent looking for opponents to be pretending to play a game.
I've been playing some Fortnite with friends. It's mainly us getting trashed and messing with people.
I found taking it much less seriously increases the fun, but that's just me. Apex is another animal in regards to play style. I can't play it.
Good on you for quitting rage games. I used to have this issue as well and after taking a few years off of them, I was able to get back into them without the anger and frustration.
I only play online games with friends now and only for fun. I actually just got into Fortnite and it’s really fun to play and just kinda goof around with friends in. If we win it’s nice but if we don’t it’s not a big deal. The game is so goofy that it’s hard to get mad at.
But when you do start realizing that the main games you play just piss you off, you need to take a step back and try to find what games actually let you have fun and what conditions you have fun under. For me it’s either single player games, or multiplayer games casually with friends.
I’d probably lose my mind playing Valorant alone but it’s really nice and casually with a group of people just talking and playing together.
Valorant, Fortnite, phasmophobia, grounded, and overwatch 2 are probably the best group games I play at this point. I can’t recommend league sadly because everyone I play with also just gets angry at this point lmao.
This is why I don't rank in League. It's ARAMs so long as I can tolerate bad teammates and then Co-op vs AI when I just want to weed & chill
Yeah, that's why prefer to avoid PvP games. I'm not good, tbf, and the stress I'm feeling is just too much to handle - my real life is stressful enough, thank you very much...
For example, I would love to experience Sea of Thieves on my own, finding some treasures, fighting skeletons or the Kraken. But the PvP aspect is killing it for me. I'm not entitled to anything, of course. Plenty of people wouldn't enjoy a pure PvE Sea of Thieves, but as far as I'm concerned, that kind of game would bring me back for sure...
Sounds to me like you just need to relax your own expectations and examine why you play those games. I started playing PUBG with friends this year and had a lot of fun. But i'm not really playing for the win. Of course we are trying to win, but the enjoyment of the game and the time we spend is just as important. A game where we try something stupid and die laughing is just as much fun as getting a win. One of my mates sometimes rages when he dies to what he considers to be bullshit but for me, I just shrug, and queue for the next game and start over. I enjoy the act of playing the game so why should i care if i have to start over?
I think the problem is in your head, apex is a relaxing game for me. Not that I wouldn’t take it seriously but I don’t invest anything into it mentaly.
I like games that indulge my poor impulse control and reward risk-taking and recklessness. Battle Royale games seem to be the exact opposite of this, which I think is why they rub me the wrong way. I don't want twenty minutes if waiting only to die in ten seconds, I wanna die over and over for twenty minutes and maybe still win the match.
Personally I can't stand the gearing up phase of BR. So boring to have to find weapons every time only to get taken out by some guy more skilled than you
If you enjoyed apex except for the high stakes format, check out titanfall 2. There's a community made client called northstar which fixes EAstrash servers and offers mods/silly game modes and customization
the singleplayer in that game is amazing, too. One of the best FPS singleplayers to date.
Those games seem like they're for the hyper competitive types, and that's just not me. Back when I was in high school in the late 90s we would play the original team fortress over the lan in the computer lab. The best part about it for me was trying to come up with funny things to say in the chat.
They're not really my cup of tea so I usually dont try them. The only two battle Royale games i enjoyed though are Tetris 99 and Super Mario 35.
I dont like battle royales
Most of the time is spent just trying to get equipment or running from point A to point B, and by the time you've spent 15-20 minutes just running, one encounter means you lose
I play CS:GO. I like it because its more constant decision making, and the shorter rounds means less time investment into a single round. But it has gotten so bad with cheaters. I have played CS for over 15 years and yet I constantly run into brand new accounts or accounts that were clearly boosted (500+ commends in each category), bought, and used by cheaters who said that "it was cheaper than rust..." The matchmaking is so atrocious, I have people at the bottom of the ranks on my team and top of the ranks on theirs; the averages arent even close. I'm not playing CS:GO anymore and if CS2 doesnt fix the cheating problem, I'm not going back.
Steep learning curve, having to wait to join a match in order to play, and not having time to just enjoy the world are my big turnoffs. I would love to run around a PUBG map with just like AI bandits and some animals
Never "got" battle royale. Except. EXCEEPT. CS:GO dangerzone and (lmao) the BR mode of Fallout 76. Those are fun. Apex did not feel anywhere near as fun as those.