But you’re exposed, the circle’s closing in, and you can hear the sound of a car engine approaching-do you have the time to crack this code?Įvery match, each of those hundred players might experience a number of these brief, geographically-specific micro-narratives. Crack the code, and you might get the drop on whoever survived this fight. If you’re careful and perceptive, you can parse a story out from this scene by examining which boxes are looted, what items they had, or which ragdolls have already despawned. These boxes serve as treasure chests, gravestones, and fonts of information for enterprising players. Did a whole squad die here trying to revive each other? This holds the dead player’s items, and it remains where they died for the remainder of the match.įour boxes in close proximity. When someone is killed, they leave a squat wooden box behind. It might signal that an entire section of the map is unsafe, and immediately provokes thoughts as to who used that door, how long ago they left, and where they might be now.ĭeath creates useful information too. In a game where being caught off-guard means being killed before you have time to react, the advantage conferred by noticing a single open door can be momentous. This means that an abandoned frying pan or northward-facing motorcycle is a definite sign of another player’s passage.
Every door is closed, all vehicles point eastward, and all items and equipment are sequestered to loot spawns defined by the game. At the beginning of each match, Erangel is in a pristine state, staged for combat by some unseen god. To survive, players are taught to reverse engineer stories from cues in their environment. Danger, whether real or suspected, is tangible, and feelings of security are rare and flimsy. Lethality is essential to how Battlegrounds invests its spaces with meaning. You rarely encounter more than a dozen other players during a game, and if it weren't for the "Players Alive" counter fixed to the screen it’d be easy to forget that you share the island with 99 others. But down on Erangel, they're all trying to hide from or kill one another, spread out over the island. About a hundred people participate in each of Battlegrounds' matches-an enormous number by the standards of most multiplayer games. This entrance is also a simple reminder of the other players populating this world. The advantage conferred by noticing a single open door can be momentous. In Battlegrounds, all of this makes the map feel much more actual and static, and it lends a constancy to landmarks that's necessary for memories to become solid and rooted, and makes players feel the distances they travel from town to town or hill to hill. You never feel the map in Skyrim because you're either walking through it at a constant rate, seeing it from eye-level, or teleporting across it.Ĭontrast this to the first time you took a gryphon ride in WoW, or flew in an airplane, or the excitement around the first photos of the Earth from space in 1966-having territory radically contextualized concretizes that territory as a single cohesive landscape. Take Skyrim: It's massive, and you can spot landmarks from a great distance, but only being able to trudge through it or fast travel means that the player's relationship to the map is mediated primarily through the overworld map, and therefore lessened. If players were to, say, spawn in at ground level, their understanding of the territory as a continuous space would be restricted to the abstraction of the map and distantly-seen landmarks.
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