With Totally Accurate Battle Simulator on the site today, I wanted to talk about Totally Accurate Battlegrounds, its tongue-in-cheek battle royale spinoff game.
TABG is very silly. Your character jiggles constantly, your gun gets stuck on doorways and teammates, and shooting or getting shot makes your aim go wild. This makes for a lot of funny moments, but also creates a soft skill cap; except through cheating or obsessive practice, player lethality is kept below a fairly low threshold. And in my experience, casual play is enough to keep many players competitive at that standard.
As an example, in the first week of early access, my squad began the endgame in a tall building in TABG’s “Industry” location. Two sides of the building are entirely open windows, with only a stairwell at one end for cover. As the circle closed in, we found ourselves in a protracted firefight with at least three other squads. Gunfire was constant, but most shots missed our squad, who had to rescue each other only a handful of times. It was the first time a competitive game gave me the sense of being under siege for minutes.
I came back to TABG recently and found that it still works in the ways I loved when I started playing it. Meanwhile, after 400+ hours PUBG has begun to frustrate me with instant death after slow rounds of looting, and Apex Legends seems unwilling to deal with the immense skill gap between players (most of my rounds end with the 10,000+ stat cards of my killer).
I think it’s the soft skill cap that keeps the game fresh for me, and I wish more competitive games would provide experiences like this. What do y’all think? Are there other games that do this?
