Realm Royale - A new kind of BR
Damn. This one came out of NOWHERE.
Realm Royale is the newest in the latest trend of taking IPs and assets and converting them over for use in the Battle Royale market.
I think games like Fortnite and PUBG are changing the gaming landscape. I hardly know anyone who plays standard team deathmatch style games anymore. A few people play CS:GO and others play Overwatch, which I don’t really consider to be part of the standard Shooter genre anyways.
Realm Royale is the latest offering from Hi-Rez studios. Yes. That Hi-Rez. Paladins Hi-Rez. It’s a class shooter Battle Royale with crafting and an interesting loot system.
The Realm is the world of Paladins and you can tell by the art style, animations, and color palette. Everything in the game is Paladins inspired including the voice over callouts you can use to communicate with your teammates.
The standard formula is broken here and I gotta say it: This is my new favorite BR. There is so much innovation here to what is already an established genre and yet EVERYTHING WORKS.
The biggest changes are the Down-But-Not-Out system and the crafting.
Standard BR have you either instantly die or go into a downed state and wait revival from a teammate. Realm Royale says no. Instead, hen you die you turn into a clucking cartoon chicken with a white flag and you can run around and jump and hide. After 30 seconds you are automatically revived with half health.
This does away with the idea that your teammates have to stop defending themselves to pick you up, which was always a point of contention I had with the system. It meant that every knock-down was that much more critical because you couldn’t resuscitate them without breaking your attention from pushers. It was a flawed system, but until now there hasn’t really been much better. And let’s be honest the only reason the chicken works is because of the Paladins world. That wouldn’t work in Fortnite or God-forbid, PUBG.
The second innovation is crafting. Everything that drops can be instantly disenchanted with one key to turn into a general crafting currency called Shards. You take your shards to one of the numerous forges on the map and use it to craft Random Legendary tier gear or class skills. If you have managed to kill an enemy player in Chicken form you’ll also get a Chicken Leg which is a material used to craft your class specific Legendary Weapon. It means that your highest power spike can’t occur unless you can kill other players. Some people seem to do fine without their weapons, but it’s always a strong option and in some cases is the best thing you can use as that class bar-none.
All the gear comes in White -> Green -> Purple -> Orange tiers with Orange, or Legendary, being the highest. If you come across upgrades spamming the assigned “pick-up” button (E by default) will swap it out. It makes the whole “which loot is better comparison” trivial. Better color = better tier and everything else? Shard it.
Now the real kicker. Every time you craft at a Forge the smoke stack lights up and the building becomes one big beacon that says “Someone is here and they’re crafting something really powerful! Come kill them and take it!” It’s an excellent addition to the BR formula. Players aren’t encouraged to hide and unlike Fortnite you can’t build cover and camp in it. The zone moves fairly quickly and with Forges at nearly every single Point-of-Interest there are always showdowns over loot.
Now, for healing yourself there is the standard health and armor potions (Realm Royale’s equivalent to Shields from Fortnite). The difference is that you can only use potions to repair what you’ve lost which means you’ll need to find armor to wear first. That armor also comes in tiers and each slot bestows buffs like movement speed, reload speed, cooldowns, etc.
To help cover ground int he map every player also has access to a mount by default by pressing Z. It takes 1s to mount and drastically improves your movement speed, but if you’re hit once or fall from to far a height you’ll be dismounted with a 2s cooldown. It seems like this would break the BR tradition about vehicles, but really all it means is that you can spend more time looting and shooting and less time running on foot to get away from the storm.
I won’t really go into detail about the classes because this isn’t meant to be a full review, but it IS a class shooter in the vein of TF2 and Overwatch and coming from Paladins the assets and expertise are there. All 5 classes feel very different and encourage different play styles. There are enough skills for each class that you can play each game as the same class and find different ways to utilize their strengths. Given that you can only equip two skills at a time and each class gets a unique movement skill you quickly realize there are so many ways to play each class. I definitely encourage you to try them all out.
Realm Royale is shaping up to be an excellent addition to the genre, which I’m happy about because things were getting stale for me, personally. I think my biggest thing to focus on is the fact that Hi-Rez saw the opportunity to jump in on the BR bandwagon and instead of just tossing assets together to copy-pasta the genre they made a completely new Battle Royale meta. I’m really glad for them because while Paladins may not be finding its footing yet Realm Royale is going to be huge. And let’s be honest, whatever gripes we have with Paladins it still took them a lot of effort and passion to make that world and its characters. Realm Royale may have left the Paladins lore on the cutting room floor but all the charm of the art style and world still manages to be distinctive and recognizable. I’m hedging bets in their favor on this one. “It’s gonna be huge.”
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