SOS Battle Royale (PC) Historical Review

 

SOS Battle Royale was the transformed version of the Survival game SOS.

SOS released in January 2018 as a Survival game, in which players had to work together or betray each other in order to escape from an island. To escape players had to collect relics, which were hidden in temples and tombs around the island. Only 3 out of the 16 players could than escape via a helicopter (helicopter arrived after shooting a flare gun and waiting a couple of minutes). The special thing about SOS was its focus on interactions between players. Every player started alone into the match, but could team up with multiple other players, if they shook hands with them. Ingame the players could only communicate via proximity chat. Alternatively they could use walkie talkies and had to agree on a common frequency, so that other players wouldn't listen into their conversations. Players could however at any point stop the teamwork and kill their mates in order to collect their loot or increase their survival chances. If 1 or 2 players had already escaped (helicopter could only collect one player at a time), than the other teams were collapsing pretty fast. This team/betrayal aspect was probably the key feature and main attraction of SOS.

The other big aspect of SOS was the entertainment/interactivity aspect of the game. Similar to the Culling (admittedly Radical Heights and Darwin Project also featured a gameshow setting), SOS had a tv-show setting and before each match all players and some of the highlights of interactions between players were shown. The game for example highlighted, that player x had previously betrayed or killed player y and both could interact in a voice chat before the match and Livestreams viewers could also choose some emotes to show their support. Role-playing via the voice chat was a key feature and one of the main attractions for the game. SOS also featured a interesting fame system for their matchmaking. Players, who regularly won or killed many players received more fame, but so did players, who were popular on the streaming websites. Popular and good players therefore got often queued up together, which was certainly a unique system.

In May 2018 SOS added a Battle Royale mode into the game. The classic mode (from there on being referred to as SOS Classic) was still playable. SOS was till this point still a P2P game and in June they switch the model to F2P and removed the classic mode.  As a response to the massive backlash of SOS Battle Royale, the developers reintroduced the classic SOS mode in August 2018. At this point however too many players had already abandoned the game and the player retention was simply not good enough, so that servers for both SOS Battle Royale and SOS Classic were closing on November 2018.

There were a couple of reasons for the backlash, that SOS BR received, but I believe the main reason was the abandonment of too many unique aspects of SOS Classic. The original SOS was less focused on combat and more on exploration of the map and interaction between players. Strangers who met didn't automatically open fire (also because there simply were a lot less weapons and ammunition), but started to first talk to each other. In SOS BR this focus shifted and all other players were killed on sight, like it is normal for a Battle Royale game. Combat in SOS also often consisted of people throwing their fists and melee weapons around or attempting to hit some of their few pistols bullets. In SOS BR weapons like ARs were much more common and combat was therefore a lot faster and resembled more the other games of the genre. The introduction of BR also removed the relics and their protectors, which were PVE monsters called Hupia, that attacked the players. Players often had to work together in order to eliminate those creatures and all of that was lost in the BR mode (Players could also get infected by Hupia and slowly turn into one of them, similar to the infection status in Zombie games). In the new version tombs and temples were only being explored in order to collect loot. The battles around the helicopter and the question, who is going to be pulled up fastest in order to gain a sweet escape, were no longer being answered in SOS Battle Royale. Instead, the goal was just to eliminate all other participants and don't get killed by the circle. The player limit was also raised from 16 to 32, but I think this was probably one of the lesser controversial aspects (Even though doubling the player amount on the same map, made combat encounters a lot more frequent).

It is however important to also consider the standpoint from the developers point of view. Outpost Games (the devs) saw, that their player numbers had been drastically decreasing since the launch and the introduction of the BR mode. More and more players left the game and in order to turn the trend around, they attempted a drastic change (Only between 100-200 players at this point and the Devs spoke of concerning financial problems). Battle Royale games were immensely popular in 2018 (to be fair they still are in 2021) and they saw it as their last chance to secure financial profitability for the game. Other aspects were the launch price of 30 Dollars, which was rather high for a small game still in development and the focus on Voice Chat. There are a lot of players, who like to interact with others via Proximity chat, but there is also a massive amount of players, who don't want to constantly talk to strangers during their playtime (There were also issues of both stream sniping and streamers exploiting their prominent position against other players). Both factors probably played a role in limiting the growth potential of SOS Classic.

A lot of the criticism from the SOS Classic players was very understandable and I believe removing the mode completely for two months after the F2P transition, was a horrible decision, that lead the game closer to its demise. Going F2P and selling cosmetics/ a Battle Pass however seemed like the right move and you also have to point out, that SOS already back then had a couple of BR elements, like that only three people of all contestants could survive. They should have however considered keeping a few more of the Classic aspects like the relics/monsters, fewer weapons and more interactions between players like the teaming up feature.

Gameplay and visuals of SOS seem to have been heavily inspired by The Culling. The combat system, which took a much more dominant position in SOS Classic, looked very familiar to that of Culling 1 (Focus on melee weapons; Purposely less precision, but a mix of fast/ heavy attacks and blocking; Guns require more skill to hit). The visual presentation also looked pretty familiar, they may have used the same engine. Apart from that however the games weren't too similiar, even though they of course both shared survival/BR elements, but SOS definitely had its own twist on things. The Culling featured a jungle environment for their main map and while the SOS map also featured jungle parts, their island had an even bigger diversity of different elements and I would generally classify the SOS map as a really beautiful iteration and something of a blueprint for a tropical island map. There were a variety of different bays and beaches, interlaced temple ruin complexes, hidden tombs, fields of long grass, which allowed players to bland in, campsites scattered around the island, thick jungles and even a large volcano. The elements mixed really well and the environment simply had this clean natural feeling of adventure and exploration. As far as I noticed, there were no significant map changes through the BR transition.

Another aspect that I already mentioned, but want to emphasize more is the standardization/ adjustment of SOS in the BR mode to the rest of the genre. Weapons didn't drastically change their patterns in the BR mode, but they went into the dominant gameplay position, which made the game fell less like SOS. Melee combat became rare instead of normal and finding numerous weapons through lootcases was very frequent. Those lootcases didn't only offer weak pistols like in classic, but SMGs, ARs and Shotguns, like you see them in most shooter games. The weapons now also featured the popular colour based rarity/effectiveness categories and armours were introduced to the game as well. Items like syringes and mushrooms against infections were removed. Players also didn't start on random locations around the map, but head to jump out of a plane that flew over the map in the beginning of each match. The UI also changed and was adjusted more to the standards of the genre (Addition of minimap, Killcount etc.).

 

Pro SOS Classic:

- Beautiful map

- Interactions with other players were essential and entertaining part of gameplay

- Mix of PVP and PVE elements

- Exploration aspect (Different paths to achieve a goal)

 

Contra SOS Classic:

- Voice Chat too mandatory for enjoyment

- High asking price

- Could have still required more polish

 

Pro SOS Battle Royale:

- Gameplay is still fun

- Map is still fantastic

(-Later on SOS BR + SOS Classic)

- F2P removes entrance barrier (Only cosmetics)

 

Contra SOS Battle Royale:

- Standardization of BR Gameplay/ Combat had a far bigger emphasize

- No more interactions with other players (Teaming up, Betrayal, Voice Chat)

- No relic hunting and PVE elements anymore (Infection/Hupia)

 

Result:

SOS Battle Royale doesn't really deserve the hate it gets, since it was still a good BR game (Fantastic map, gameplay still fun). It is however difficult to argue, that it was more than that, since it adjusted its gameplay mechanics too much to other games to stand out. SOS Battle Royale seems to have been good short term fun, but not much more than that and on an emotional level the criticism of the fans is understandable. SOS Classic was simply a much more unique game in the Survival genre and the team/trust aspect haven't yet been managed to be expended in any other game I know of (There are some Horror games and for example 'The Cycle', which have familiar concepts, but less determinant). SOS Classic also had a much better combination of PVP and PVE than most other survival games out there (at least in my subjective opinion). It is however doubtful whether Classic would have survived longterm on its own, but the complete removal of it for 2 months was a large mistake. In my humble opinion, the devs should have kept the main focus on Classic, but used BR as an alternative mode and indeed went F2P. This would have been much better than removing the more popular of the two modes for too long and still keeping the main focus on BR, even though the community signaled them to do the opposite. SOS wasn't a flawless game, but it looked like it offered good fun and it certainly deserved better than it got.  

 

SOS BR: 6/10

SOS Classic: 7/10