Watchers attempts a new spin on battle royale
There’s a new battle royale contender in town and it goes by the name of Watchers. Developed by Blindfold and published by Alawar Premium, Watchers looks to create something of a social experiment by giving players who are eliminated a task; Watching the game unfold and handing them tools to impact the match. Instead of just leaving and queuing up for your next match, Watchers tasks you with actually seeing the game through as a spectator while still allowing you to participate. Given that the game is free to play and available on Steam as we speak, I was able to play a couple hours of Watchers to share my thoughts.
First and foremost, you’ll notice that Watchers is played from a top-down isometric perspective and features a visual style akin to Fallout’s pre-apocalypse art. Players do battle in what feels like small town America back in the day of Lassie and The Brady Bunch. Much of the game is built around this theme, which works very well and makes it fairly unique among shooters. With that said, the isometric view of Watchers also leads me to my first complaint about the game; While most isometric battle royales like Surviv.io offer a mechanism to expand your field of view, Watchers does not as far as I can tell. This makes longer ranged combat very difficult. Even if you find a “Heavy Rifle” which is essentially the game’s sniper rifle, you can only use it at the same range as a Submachine Gun, Pistol or Shotgun because you can only see so far. While this issue didn’t cause me any issues in-game, it did pop out to me as a flaw in the game’s design.
With that caveat out of the way, the basic combat of Watchers does feel pretty good. You have your basic assortment of weaponry to find on the map, a shrinking circle and you can upgrade your weapons along the way to help you take down the other 29 people vying for the crown. The thing that makes Watchers stand out however is the “watching” mechanic so let’s get into that.
Once you die in Watchers, you become a spectator with the ability to watch the entire match unfold from above. You can freely move about the map, zooming in our out as far as you’d like. Some have compared this spectator mode to playing “God” as you can see every player on the map from your top down perspective. You can see when two or more players are about to run into each other and quickly zoom in to catch the action. Watchers takes things even a step further though, allowing you to actually impact the match in small ways while dead.
While “watching” after you’ve died, you can place bets on players indicating that you believe that they will get a kill within a short period of time. If your prediction comes true, you earn points. You then use those points to place some sort of effect on the match. The effects range from placing a zone on the map where every player inside gets a movement speed bonus, bend bullets toward a central location or even cause zombies to rise out of the ground and go after players. As the game progresses, watchers also get to vote on where circles should be placed, potentially causing many of the game’s players to have to high tail it across the map. Finally, when only three players remain, the abilities of all watchers are disabled and you are able to vote on who you think will win the game and watch it unfold, rooting for your pick until the end.
One of the abilities that I most enjoyed using as a “watcher” was the ability to place sprays on the ground. I found myself using arrows and cross heir sprays to try and lead players to other players to force fights or flush out someone who was camping. The thing is, the player that you’re trying to lead may not believe that you’re being honest or he/she may be trying to avoid combat rather than seek it. While I didn’t find that many players were taking my signs, I did enjoy trying to influence the match in this way and I enjoyed wondering what was going through the players’ heads when I did something.
All in all, while I do feel like the “watching” aspect of Watchers is fairly unique, I’m not sure that the actions that the watchers have are strong enough to carry the game. Most of the actions that you can take as a watcher are fairly minor and don’t usually make much of an actual impact on the way that the game unfolds. For balance reasons, its easy to see why you don’t want to hand the watchers too much power, especially considering that there will inevitably be quite a few of them tinkering with the match as it progresses and more players die and become watchers. Its because of this limitation however that I feel like the watcher mechanic isn’t strong enough to compel players to continue playing in a genre where there is so much competition, even at the free to play price point.
The Darwin Project is another battle royale game that tried this “God of the game” concept but instead of handing the ability to everyone that died, awarded the position to just one person for the entire match. This allows the person in charge to make much more impactful decisions as there aren’t dozens of people with their fingers in the pie. With that said, if Watchers is going to be successful, they’re going to need to strengthen the watching mechanic and allow for more satisfying means of contribution.
The battle royale genre is chock full of competition and at this point in time, most matches of Watchers are made up of a handful of players and filled out by bots. Even after Dr. Disrespect recently played the game on stream, it seems that the player population hasn’t grown. While that’s not a death sentence by any means as plenty of games have modest beginnings and grow over time in the current gaming market, Watchers is going to have a tough time growing if it doesn’t strengthen its core mechanic and identity. The concept is an intriguing one for sure, so lets hope that the development team can make some bold strides and build upon the game in 2020.
