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The much-awaited and fun new Battle Royale game, Fall Guys, finally released on August 4th to thousands of hungry players.
Fall Guys is a quirky take on the Battle Royale genre opting for a hilarious Gang Beasts aesthetic in both gameplay and art style.
Wobbly jelly beans controlled by players run and jump across all manner of bright multi-coloured obstacle courses, competing in successive rounds of races, elimination and teamplay before finally rounding off with a finale. In each round, more and more players are knocked out until only one remains at the end and is crowned champion.
It’s a fresh take on the genre and although extremely simple in design, it was tipped to become a huge success in a market hungering for just this kind of game.
In much the way of Nintendo classics, Fall Guy’s simplicity of controls and mechanics belies its depth and fun. There will certainly be some form of tournaments and competitions in this game moving forwards and, if well-maintained and supported post-launch, it looks to become a stable favourite for ludicrous multiplayer fun.
And while that same quirky sense of humour is manifest in whoever is running Fall Guys’ Twitter account, release day issues meant it wasn’t plain sailing.
It might come as no surprise to hear that Fall Guys struggled to keep up with the enormous demand on release, with upwards of 1.5 million players logging in to try it out on release, aided no doubt by the fact that it is currently freely available on Playstation for PSPlus users.
Indeed, servers failing under unexpected load due to an unanticipated demand is not entirely uncommon on release day in the industry. Just this year, Wolcen suffered similarly as it struggled to handle the hundreds of thousands of players that drowned the game on launch.
The usual reasoning came from the team behind Fall Guys – thanking fans for their interest and asking for patience as they tried to resolve their server issues. Could the developers have handled things better?
Firstly, the developers must have known that an enormous player load was incoming. The hype for their game has been enormous, they had just completed a hugely successful beta test and millions of gamers are trapped in their homes hungering for new games to play, after exhausting their libraries over the last several months.
Indeed, by virtue of their volume of pre-orders alone, they absolutely should have been able to predict a huge load on their servers. For this reason, some players were disappointed the developers were not able to provide adequate servers. Considering the $20 retail price, this means that Mediatonic will be looking at revenue of at least $30m – did they really lack the means to provide servers for everyone wanting to play?
Secondly, the team complained of ‘review-bombing’ after thousands of negative reviews on Steam pushed them down to a ‘mixed’ rating. These came from players wanting to play, only to be met by an infinite loading screen or endless connection errors. These were frustrated players who had purchased a product that didn’t work on launch day, and they reflected their frustration with negative reviews.
Mediatonic complained about these reviews and openly solicited positive reviews from their fans in an attempt to balance them out – and it worked!
Their rating went back to ‘mostly positive’ and then up to ‘very positive’.
Review-bombing is a serious problem in gaming whereby players provide negative reviews and comments on (even unreleased) products. Just this year, we saw The Last of Us 2 review-bombed ahead of release and for reasons entirely outside the scope of its gameplay.
In fact, these events were so serious as to warrant a host of articles discussing what can be done to reduce or stop the practice, with some suggesting introducing alternative rating systems instead, such as ones sourced from panels of expert reviewers in a style similar to online casino ranking sites.
To call negative reviews from players who couldn’t play a game due to technical faults ‘review-bombing’ has been criticised by some.
Fall Guys is continuing to do well and seems to be the game of the moment. Let’s see what the Fall Guys’ developers may have to deal with as it grows in the future.
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