A Woeful Lack of Polish
By developer Boss Key’s own admission, Radical Heights is a “janky” package (see the in-game news feed). But while we’ve seen video games successfully iterate and improve from Early Access in the past – most recently and famously, Fortnite Battle Royale – Radical Heights feels like it’s much too rough in its current state to convince us things will turn around any time soon. There’s Early Access, and then there’s rushing a product to capitalize on a genre fad, which is rather what Radical Heights reeks of.
Vehicles and buildings look terribly rough, and some structures lack textures altogether. The shooting mechanics feel rudimentary, absent of any weight and recoil, and we’ve encountered all sorts of bugs when traversing the map. Yes, we expect these kinks can all be worked out in time, but if Boss Key was trying to pull a Fortnite, it completely glazed over a key detail: Fortnite felt polished at launch. Epic spent over five years developing the PvE game, and even though the current battle royale mode has moved things forward dramatically since launch, it was still a joy to play from the first jump out of the Battle Bus.
Certainly, PUBG has its fair share of glitches and technical woes, particularly on Xbox One, but it’s also a much deeper and more technically advanced package on the whole. You simply can’t compare an epic-scale military sim like PUBG to the simplicity of Radical Heights. There’s a gulf in quality between Radical Heights and its competitors that is plain to see.
Battle Royale Competition Too Stiff
This leads us to Radical Heights’ biggest issue: the game simply isn’t appealing enough to lure players away from the genre’s two leading giants.
Fortnite and PUBG are absolutely killing it right now, but frighteningly for their future competition, they don’t even necessarily feel as though they’ve reached their zenith in terms of popularity. PUBG’s numbers have wobbled a little recently, but there’s a growing Chinese audience, and the game is yet to debut on PS4 – which we expect it probably will at some point.
As for Epic’s Fortnite, well, it continues to smash records and defy expectations again and again. There seems to be no ceiling to that game’s stratospheric success. Fortnite is Radical Heights’ closest rival in terms of the audience it’s trying to capture and the design aesthetic it attempts to put a spin on. But why on earth would you abandon a thriving community and the promise of Epic’s commitment to improving an already excellent game moving forward? There’s nothing that would convince me Boss Key Productions, fresh from its recent failure attempting to carbon copy “hero shooters” with Lawbreakers, can possibly topple Fortnite with Radical Heights. And so far, it looks every bit the poor relation.
It Doesn’t Move the Genre Forward
Sure, there are some novel ideas introduced to the battle royale formula in Radical Heights. The shifting grid system, for starters, moves us away from the whole shrinking circle concept that has emerged as the standard. There’s also the vending machine design to buy weapons, which makes a nice change from having to randomly search chests and floor loot in Fortnite (even though Fortnite has just introduced its own vending machines too). But is that really enough to pique gamer’s interests and shift their attention away from the communities of other battle royale games?
Everything else about Radical Heights retro 80s aesthetic looks less like an interesting point of difference and more a desperate cry for attention. Neon lights, cheesy music, BMX’s – it’s the video game design equivalent of peacocking for attention, but it really doesn’t feel as though there’s a great enough foundation of ideas here to make a song and dance over.
The Player Count Is Concerningly Low
The trouble with waiting for Radical Heights to iterate and improve over time in Early Access is that it’s highly unlikely the servers will even be around long enough for those updates to come. Earlier today, Githyp recorded some concerningly low concurrent player numbers for Radical Heights, peaking at only one thousand more than Lawbreakers own record of 7,500. While it’s true that Radical Heights’ announcement was out of the blue, we’re still talking about a free-to-play experience, where Lawbreakers was a paid package. It’s too early to tell quite yet, but the writing may already be on the wall.
Again, drawing a comparison to Fortnite, its own success was boosted significantly by the PvE community’s interest in the game. In combination with Fortnite’s multiplatform availability versus PUBG’s PC exclusivity, it recorded one million players on its first day. Those numbers really drive home the disparity here. Fortnite was considered to have a huge challenge on its hands overcoming PUBG’s immense draw, but it was attracting over 100 times the player count of Radical Heights after a single day.
Priorities in the Wrong Place
Early Access is a system that has traditionally been employed by smaller developers looking for feedback before releasing the final, honed package. It’s about incorporating users into an iterative design process in the spirit of improving the game and instilling confidence in potential buyers. It is not an excuse to release a completely unfinished product flush with microtransactions to make a quick buck.
Seriously, what excuse is there for Boss Key Productions to have taken the time to properly detail, animate, and make attractive anything to do with in-game cash but include building art assets that literally look as though they’ve been copy-pasted from a generic Unity toolkit? How are there already cosmetic microtransactions and a $14.99 Founders Pack for a game that is this early in its development process? And even if Boss Key has since reversed the 10% cash bonus for Founders Pack purchasers, it’s a big red flag that a pay-to-win design even made it into the package to begin with. Don’t try and tell us they didn’t know what they were doing there.
Consider that Fortnite Battle Royale released totally void of microtransactions. Epic intelligently waited for its player count to grow, its community to provide valuable feedback, and for the game to resemble a product worth spending money on long before the Locker or Season Pass system was introduced. It fostered goodwill between developer and player, and that’s been right at the heart of the game’s financial success – players want to spend money on a quality product. Boss Key Productions again failed to take heed of a clear and obvious lesson learned by Epic, and it looks rather like a lack of belief in the game’s long-term success on their part.
Published: Apr 11, 2018 01:13 pm