What Would Modern Video Games Look Like Without Battle Passes

Concord won’t have a battle pass. While I’m sceptical whether Sony’s upcoming shooteꦐr will attract enough of an audience to even justify creating one,𒐪 developer Firewalk bypassing the common monetization tactic in favour of an unfolding weekly narrative and hero customisation is a bold move, one none of us expected to see.

It has me thinking about the modern state of video games, where nearly every major online release is designed around capturing all your attention all of the time. Lifestyle games like Fortnite, Destiny, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Apex Legends, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Overwatch🐲 make signing in every day to complete 🃏the quests they offer feel essential to not missing out.

When I think about the first contemporary multiplayer shooter, my mind jumps to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Other games like Battlefield, Halo, and earlier COD entries came before, but this was the first one to establish the addictive cadence of earning experience to level up, customising loadouts, and fast-paced matches where serotonin was delivered at an alarming rate. Ever since it releas𓆉ed in 2007, most games that followed ꦜhave been chasing Modern Warfare’s success. It isn’t an exaggeration to say it changed everything.

But even innovators eventually become complacent, or must adapt to a changing mark🍎et to maintain their audience or push in new directions previously thought impossible. After a time, earning ranks in multiplayer games like Call of Duty, Halo, or Gears of War before eventually hitting prest🌱ige and doing it all over again with new maps and weapons wasn’t enough. You wanted more, and that’s where the battle pass comes in.

What Game Had The Very First Battle Pass?

You might think Fortnite was the first game to introduce a battle pass, since it was definitely the game that helped popularise them in the current landscape. But the first instance actually came from DOTA 2, all the way back in 2013. During its yearly International tournament, players could purchase a ‘Compendium’ which let them earn a variety of unique in-game content, with 25 percent o🐓f proceeds going to the prize p🔯ool.

The concept would be iterated upon more and more in the coming years, inside and outside the International, and folded into the Dota Plus subscription service. It even appeared in Team Fortress 2 at⛦ one point, showing that Valve was definitely experimenting with this approach to monetization.

Jack Sparrow and other characters in the Fortnite key artwork for Cursed Sails.

Fast-forward to 2017, and Fortnite picked up the battle pass idea for its battle royale, working them into a seasonal release model where every few months you could pick up and progress through a new battle pass with distinct theming, skins, cosmetics, and other unlock🃏ables that would vanish into the ether once the season came to an end. You were incentivised to log in every day and keep up with all the new occurrences, which largely goes onto explain why Fortnite was able to become such a runaway success. Less than a year after its battle pass became the norm, every other live service game out there followed in its footsteps.

Now it’s 2024, and you can’t log onto Call of Duty, Destiny, Halo, Apex, Overwatch, Zenless Zone Zero, Rocket League, or pretty much any modern online game without having all your worth tied directly to one of them. It would be easier to list the games that don’t have a battle pass than those that do, which is what makes Concord🉐 such a fascinating exception.

What Would Games Look Like If Battle Passes Didn’t Exist?

concord core squad members — via Firewalk

That’s an interesting question, and one I don’t really have an answer for. Part of me believes we would have seen multiplayer games continue to mature in the sam🤪e direction with annual instalments and upgrade paths that allow you to customise your weapons and characters so they fairly represent you as a player. Or maybe storytelling like we see in games today like Fortnite and Destiny would have matured at a faster rate, or proven more ambitious if a seasonal template didn’t restrict them to a glacial pace held in place by monetisation.

Battle passes only exist as a tool of monetiation. Yes, it’s rewarding to unlock new skins or cosmetics throughout a season that encourages you to come back again and again, but games often require you to pay money upfront for the premium experience, and will delete passes from history forever the second a season comes to a close. The design philosophy of most online games now is built around the battle pass because this is how you make money not𓂃 only in free-to-play titles, but paid ones too. It’s a reason for people to stick around and actually care, since withoꦅut one you’re an outlier. Fortnite normalised this practice, and I’m not sure where we will go from here.

It’s why I want to🏅 give Concord the benefit of a doubt, in spite of its seemingly doomed nature. Firewalk wants to put weekly narrative beats first, which in theory would make us care about characters and the journey they are collectively embarking upon, and use that as a reason to remain a regular player.

But I already know that isn’t going to work. It asks too much of the player and doesn’t offer a tantalising enough cosmetic reward or seasonal outings that keep thܫe game fresh and exciting. It’s surprisingly old school in that regard, and I doubt it will even earn the chance to prove any of us wrong. A shame, as it might have been a chance to glimpse what could have been if battle passes hadn’t taken over the gaming world.